The Starcluster
by Senri
Summary: A collection of Zim drabbles of various genre, pairing, and rating, written for a livejournal community. Drabble 58: Fall.
1. Children

Explanation: I joined the fanfic100 community on livejournal. They give you 100 one-word prompts to start you writing stuff. This is the first challenge; expect to see more.

/028. **Children**

Irkens didn't have children, not in the conventional sense. They had smeets, but smeets leapt with all their knowledge from the ground and went to ships and stores and mines to do their jobs as adults. All they needed was practice and they were good to go. There wasn't any of this messing about with childrearing, no coddling of soft white pupae until they were _old_ enough and _responsible_ enough to look after themselves. Smeets got electricity tearing through their bodies and an identity and then they were cast out into the world.

Electricity made Dib jump and shudder. Zim watched him curiously, fidgeting his claws and pricking his antennae up to catch every garbled word and groan. It was repulsive, really. Dib smelled of pain and the shit and urine he had fouled himself with. He was twitching spasmodically, belly-down on the metal floor. One hand clenched and relaxed again and again. The fingernails were torn back and blood was leaking out, diluting orangish and spreading slowly. He was still alive. If he were dead he wouldn't be bleeding.

Zim went to him, toed him in the side with one black boot. He knelt and lifted Dib's head up by pulling his thick black hair. All the blood vessels in Dib's eyes had broken, so that formerly-white sclera was pinkish and foul looking. His eyes were rolled so far back in his head that pink was all that showed. It was a sickly color, pre-Irken, babyish. Electricity was what made humans work, in tiny amounts; but you gave them too much and they broke so so easy. Dib hadn't even turned twelve yet.


	2. She ::DATR hints::

/085. **She.**

Girls and boys liked to trade their skool photos. It was a silly, sweet, old tradition: giggly kids passing around photos to crushes, to admirers, to best friends to be stuck in lockers and gloated over. The most popular children plastered their class folders and the doors of their lockers with them, collaging face onto face, picking up images of people who mattered.

Dib stayed to watch Tak get her photos. He sat in the photographer's equipment, delaying returning to Bitters' class as long as possible, and looked at the way Tak looked at everything else: her narrow watchful eyes, the thing sarcastic smile-smirk she shot towards the camera, with only the narrowest edge of her white teeth showing. The lights flared up and she blinked, looked startled, her lips pulling back into something like a snarl. Then it was over and they were moving her out, moving the next kid in. Dib scrambed out of his nest and walked with her, willing to go back to class if he had a friend along. Tak was blinking and rubbing at her eyes, looking slightly dazzled.

Two months later the backages came in, fat envelopes stuffed with glossy pictures. Dib pulled his out and inspected them critically. He didn't like having his picture taken. He always looked white and timid and frail, and underfed. He wouldn't want anyone to have _this_ to remember him by, but...

Tak had spread her own pictures out over her desk and was turning them over and over, looking perplexed. Dib coughed to get her attention, and offered her one of his own pictures, held across his own sticky palm. "Want to trade?" he asked. "Everybody else is doing it, I promise not to do anything horrible to your picture, you don't have to take mine if you don't want it... but can I please have one of yours?"

She eyed him and smiled. Big, wide, no teeth showing. "Mine are hideous!" she said. "Father's always taken me to a private photographer before. But you can have one, if you like." And delicately she picked up the photo he offered, with the very tips of her fingers. Dib smiled at her and took it home, where he stuck it onto his computer monitor where he could look at it when spying on Zim was slow.

A week later, he tore it down, crumpled it in his fist. Then he smoothed it out and looked at it again. The edged look to her smile, narrow and reserved. The calculating, judging eyes. The look that was familiar: Zim at his smooth-talking evil best.

He wished he had a picture of the Tak that had been under the disguise, the _real_ Tak, to remind himself of what she was. Gelatinous purple eyes. Smooth green skin and snug-curled antennae, and a metal device plugged into her head. Sneering and laughing (at HIM this time) and alien, alien, alien. Maybe he should have seen it, since nothing so good could ever happen to him so conveniently.

Maybe he should just have known.

END

10/21/05


	3. Broken

/071. **Broken**

The cast on Dib's arm was chunky, white, and totally unmarked. Zim couldn't stop staring at it.

Humans had funny customs. They liked to mark things. Any other kid, and the cast would have been covered in doodles, signitures, tic-tac-toe games, orders to get well soon, meaningless scribbles... but Dib had no friends, and his cast stayed clean. The human just propped it irritably on the edge of his desk, making a face at how it restricted the room he had for his textbook and notebook, and otherwise he managed to ignore it. The broken arm wasn't the one he wrote with, so he could manage.

Zim sidled up to him at lunch, clutching a black sharpie in one hand. He'd finally decided that, really, he wanted to _do_ something about that whiteness. He wanted to show off, in some way only the two of them - Dib and Zim - would understand, that _he'd_ been the cause of this injury, that _he'd_ ruled what happened to Dib during those moments.

The cracking bone had been such a pleasant noise. Dib's scream, even more so.

So he joined the boy at lunch, giving him a wide, nasty grin. Dib eyed his enemy warily. Zim had sat on his left side - the side with the cast. It was less agile, unguarded.

"Helloooo, Dib," he cooed. This boy, here, this tensely-sitting wary twitching boy, was not his enemy. This child was a _joke_. Boy with useless arm tries to stop amazing Irken Invader. Boy is crushed horribly. Ahahaha. This was a person who was worthy of being cooed at. "Arm feeling any better?"

"Fuck you," Dib snapped back, shoving his tray away across the table. "Yeah, my arm's feeling fantastic. Second this cast gets off, I'm going to, I dunno, install some pins and stuff to reinforce the bone and beat your ass with it. I can't _believe_ you did this."

Zim reached over, tapped his fingers on the hard shell. "Get well sooooon," he grinned. "I guess I'll just have to get busy taking over the world without you."

Dib threw one leg back across the bench, clenched his jaw, and glared. He was feeling pissy and ready to get out of there. Zim grinned and snapped one hand out and pinned Dib's arm to the table; he uncapped the sharpie and scrawled onto the cast -

Lightning-bolt Z, boring boring letter I, M like mountain. ZIM. Beautiful.

"Get well, get well," he sang cheerfully to the furious human. "It's not any fun without you around."

The next day, Zim's name was scribbled out in a blob of black that reached tendrils all over the cast. The evidence was gone, but both of them still _knew_.


	4. Not Enough ::ZADR hints::

**/034. NOT. ENOUGH.**

:WARNING: ZADR HINTS.:

Look at him wild in your hands, a shying breaking thing. Burning inside out with his own pale fire and the tumors (benign?) growing in his joints and organs, between all the metal bits you stuck in to make him better. Bite marks zippering down the shining white of his arms - where you set your teeth, too. He is all yours, all yours for all his life (_whatever's left of that now_) - all his inner secret places, the two round-pocked scars on his belly and the stitches marching like ants across his head.

Hold him gently, carefully - but it's hard not to let him blow out, tiny thing, frail thing, a spark compared to a bonfire in terms of _life_. How much does he have left now? Four years, with all this mess? Four months? Nothing. Not to you. Not to a race that's watched the rise and fall of other tiny empires. And oh and oh a human is not an empire, and human is a weak and scorching-hot thing that goes out _quickly_. When he dies you will still be here to raise a veil across the world. So maybe right now it doesn't hurt to humor him, play nice, touch him without breaking the skin -

It would be so easy to break those fingers. Slot them neatly between your own and think about it, bend them back (_oh, just a little_) so that the tendons stand out on his skin. Oh, oh. See how it hurts. If the little bones broke they'd make sounds like little whisper cracks, like breaking glass, like shattering ice, chiming out so gently, oh -

See how dark the under-his-eyes is. The purplish of sunsets, of dying flowers, of bruises. He mumbles through the respirator wearily, knowing the cold ache of metal seeding itself down his bones, superceding the humany bits - just a little, a little by little by little. Oh, how weak the flesh is. "More work tomorrow, Zim?" he slurs muffily. Roll his thumb around in its socket. Crack his knuckles for him. Look at him - the dying thing - how optimistic can he possibly be? How blind and hopeful a liar?

A sheaf of years. That's all. A handful of dust, scraped from under the bed, on the windowsill, on top of the fridge - that's all his life is, all he _has_. A clockwork heart that beats and wears down quickly. A shivering metal-coil mind that rusts and goes dull.

"Yes," you tell him.


	5. Why?

/080. **Why?**

Why the _world_?

When all it's done is try to break you, and there could be so much _more_.

So every day is a violent uphill battle -

-_ and from the sky, the stars are calling_ -

and at nights you don't sleep so easy, with the ache of gravity in your bones -

- so that every day at sunrise, your heart _breaks_.

And it's not going to stop any day of your life.

Dib slept gently, on the roof: cradled by the cold hands of the world and barred in by the dawn. His heart was growing, his soul ballooning, his flesh burning away - preparing for take-off. He'd lost fifteen pounds in the last three months. He wanted to jump and never come down.

He wanted...

_One time, Zim pulled him out of the fire and held him up high in a baptism of heat. Dib coughed and coughed and kicked, his lungs feeling like two collapsed wet paper bags and being about as useful. The alien glared at him with voracious eyes. Garnet red and hungry. The dark crimson of blood whipped up to a froth - the color of the parts of some nebulas. Beautiful. Beautiful. Raging. "Human," he screamed, in a chainsaw voice, "are you INSANE!"_

Dib tried to answer him, but any words there could be crisped and blew away in the flame.

He didn't - want - to die, before he saw everything there was to see. He'd opened his heart and let all the passion fall out and scatter everyplace, to the lilies and the oak trees and the gold savannah where lions stretched replete under the trees and love flew up from the earth to the stars and the black holes (_starving and lonely, when nothing could get close without being eaten_) and the quasars and everything. Everything. Everything deserved it. He couldn't help it. It held him as a tether to the things he chose and didn't choose, to his sister and to Zim.

He was born lucky, and that was all the luck he got - being planted on earth, there, to grow. For the rest he had to make his own luck. And with sweaty palms he would, he would do as he pleased, and do it with all the grace he could muster.

The earth's infinite and flaming child. His head was big enough to have its own gravity well, and people got _pulled in_ to that - they played in his world. He had a vibrant voice. Driven. Sparks smashing from between his teeth. He was holy enough to cough up starmatter, jamming up hot in his throat.

At eleven he was fighting a losing battle against people who wouldn't hear. At sixteen he was raging. At seventeen he was ready to pick up his heels and give it all to the sky.

_He stood with hot water foaming up around his theighs - skin boiled red, sweating. He reached up one hand towards the dust-colored sky, and braced against the winds screaming around him and the currents yanking at his legs. The Voot Cruiser screamed around him in circles, Zim fighting to bring it down close enough to grab him, and Dib waited and dug his very toes to the earth. Don't leave me, he was thinking, and stretched his arm out long enough - long enough - and Zim turned the Cruiser over in a crazy swoop and hung out his own hand and somewhere, they met, Zim's hand to Dib's wrist and vice versa, taking hold with a CRACK. Dib dragged off his feet and up. On the move._

He thought that in the end, the world deserved a chance - like everything.

END

11/23/05


	6. Writer's Choice: Promises

**/096. Writer's Choice: Promises**

They promised each other things with their eyes and their hands. _I'll chase you forever, I'll fight you forever, you're mine forever - my enemy._ At eleven and three-hundred-twenty they sealed it with eye contact and words in torrents, searing from their mouths, shaking with adrenaline, near-feral with anticipation. _Wherever you go, I'm following in your footsteps, I'm biting at your heels, I'm cutting at your back - don't let your guard down, don't turn your face from me, watch my eyes always, be careful or this ENDS._ They kept it up through the teens, through twenties, Dib's sharpest finest years, eyes sunset-gold, mica-gold, snapping. Zim honed him with the care and expertise worthy of a master sculptor - worthy of _Dib_. He ran his hands over each fine curve of the human's mind and left fingerprints, Irken flags, and pride. At their best, at their shivering frothing violent best, it seemed like they could never touch each other: one would come across his doppelganger, bound with gravity, shame, all those binding things, and sneer and strike the bonds off and toss him up burning with star fever into space in an orgy of rage and excitement and the kind of crushing, immolating love a predator might have for _prey_.

But it couldn't last forever.

They turned their faces away from knowing - but it couldn't last forever.

Zim came to the funeral without anyone knowing how he found out about it - taller, thinner, boiled to toughness, rough and grinning with the bite of agony in his smile. Dib's children, grandchildren, looked at him and knew him and turned away quickly so that he could stand and run his hands over the large ebony coffin (_open casket_) and release his self-control in peace. He stood there for the longest time, with humans shifting and wafting around him easily, and when the family was going home and the funeral parlor manager was anxious and wanted him out Dib's oldest daughter brushed her still-inky hair behind her ears and talked the man into letting Zim stay. She'd known him her entire life, the snapping deadly uncle-creature who showed up unexpectedly and sometimes, gently, laid his hand across her throat and _looked_ at her.

Zim stayed three hours, gazing down onto _Dib_ - or not Dib, but what was left when Dib got tired of using his body. He didn't look like he was sleeping. Dib rolled around when he slept, laughed and muttered to himself, and now he was still. As he'd aged his face had lined, his eyes gone watery and tired-colored, the sepia of old black-and-white-photos left long in the sun... Dib, declining. It was hard to let him go.

_I'll chase you forever..._

It was a promise they'd both known Dib couldn't keep.


	7. Series: Spiral

/**086. Choices.**

It was a beautiful day, and the end of the world was coming. Red ships buzzed like locusts through the sky. Greasy smoke choked the air.

Zim slammed Dib down, grabbed his ears, made him hold still. "What do you want!" he snarled. "Tell me! Choose now, whether you want to live or die! HURRY!" The human couldn't hold still, he kept glancing convulsively upwards with his eyes huge and pupils dilated. Zim shook him harshly. "DECIDE!"

Dib gaped at him. Tears filmed on the boy's eyes. "I want to live," he breathed. It was the absolute and final truth.

/**078. Where?**

"Where am I?" Dib snarled, turning his head quickly. Zim staunched him with a hand in the small of his back and scowled.

"Quiet." The alien looked out at the fleet – his people's fleet, spreading in a maelstrom of red. "We're above the atmosphere. I pulled you off before the organic sweep." He didn't turn the space station to show Dib the cracked brown remnants of earth – he didn't want to deal with that.

The human looked suspicious, flexing his muscles, constrained by enemy bonds. Zim just smell him thinking _Where do I stand here,_ and couldn't entirely blame him.

/**077. What?**

"What, _what!"_ Dib grabbed at his head, tore his fingers through his hair. "A _rebellion! YOU!"_

"Not so loud!" Zim snarled, glancing anxiously about. "Not a rebellion – a takeover so I can make things _better_."

Dib didn't look convinced. "_Why?"_

Zim lashed out, dragged him forward, gasped bloodily into his face: "Because it was _mine. _Because earth was all _mine _and they took it, they tried to get rid of _me. _Get rid of _Zim!_ The fools!"

Dib reached up carefully, unfolded Zim's claws from around his collar. "You're dead meat. Don't take me with you."

Zim grinned. "Too late."

/**003. Ends.**

Zim gave Dib anesthetic before he broke the boy's hands. He went from thumbs to pinkies, not looking at Dib's face. He could hear the human taking deep, rapid breaths; he wasn't feeling any pain but his bones were being crushed to powder. When Zim finished with the slim bones in the meat of Dib's hands he set them at the human's side and turned away. He'd declawed his enemy, broken him in two - a favor to keep him safe. He looked away to allow Dib's breathing to steady, and reached for the tools to start on Dib's legs.

/**029. Birth.**

"A remote link." He held it out to Dib, turning the delicate bundle of wires, allowing the human to see it from every angle. "I can put it in your head, and put you away, and you can control an Irken pak. Want it?" Treasonous words - his jelly-red eyes twitched nervously up and to the side. Contact with Dib was a monumental risk.

Blank stare. Zim observed him, not obviously. The boy was close to snapping. Dib had to say yes.

"Don't make me a girl," the boy said. "Or shorter than _you_."

Zim snapped his teeth and _grinned_.

/**040. Sight.**

"No." Dib lifted one arm, turned his face away. "No, I said _no_! You can't do this to me!"

Zim snarled, grabbed Dib's hand, forced it down. "Be _quiet_, human, this will keep you alive. If you seem like a threat in any way you'll certainly _die_. You didn't want to _die, right_?"

The boy was frantic, his eyes that wouldn't be working for much longer wide. "You don't understand," he gasped, painfully vulnerable. Zim snarled at the weakness and stood up, forcing his superior height on Dib. "No," the human continued desperately – "If I can't see I'll die _inside_."

/**074. Dark.**

"You're sure this will work, right?"

Dib turned his head, tracking Zim's footsteps, expression anxious – blindness had ruined his good facial control. The Invader smirked at his unseeing charge, grabbed a thick handful of hair (Dib gasped at contact), turned his face down again, into the mask dispensing gas. "Of course," he cooed, watching Dib's muscles slacken. "Trust Zim."

He reached over Dib to key in a code on a touchpad – in front of the human a black hole dilated. Sightless, sleeping – no trouble hiding Dib here. He fit easily into the long hole, neat, quiet - Zim's best secret.

/**072. Fixed.**

Dib touched his face awkwardly, inspected his purple eyes and antennae with his fingers, not used to seeing again yet. Proud of himself, Zim grinned wide at the human-Irken. "See! It worked, and you smell much better now!"

The other coughed, tried talking. The voice was different but his intonation remained. "Zim, you JERK, I said don't make me shorter than you…"

Zim laughed. Already his internal spring of dementia and glee was bubbling over – it never took much. "In spite of your TININESS this form is immeasurably superior to a _human's!_"

Dib growled. "Do you actually have a PLAN?"

/**001. Beginnings.**

The dreadnought was beautiful, enormous; a red-and-purple leviathan gliding through space. Zim watched it with pride, with anticipation, Dib the human-turned-Irken quivering with energy beside.

Lovely ship, one of the new designs, pride of the Armada. All streamlined and deadly, Invader's symbol striking black along the side. Zim's spooch twisted with anticipation watching it.

Dib began to gnaw at his claws.

Engine pods fired; the ship began to roll and turn away, headed out towards deep space when – explosions bloomed along the seams where armor plates met. Redorange orchid petals, lashing out into dark.

Zim laughed. His two-man rebellion begun.

/**070. Storm.**

It was a wild, careering dogfight, no gravity making silly rules – Dib and Zim screamed through it, under tight control, running wild. Zim laughed like jackhammer, manning the guns. Dib's antennae flattened with terror and he breathed quickly, avoiding destruction by narrow margins. It was the worst thing he'd ever lived through, the best thing, it was _exciting_, it was _release_, it was finally taking a stand and punching those Irken bastards in the face. He was sure he was going to die.

"Don't let me down, Dib," Zim raved by his side.

Dib clenched his teeth, and did _better._

/**030. Death.**

At the end, it was lovely.

Two guerilla fighters, surviving by the skin of their teeth and their wit, feeding off each other, trained off each other. Zim clamped down hard onto Dib, neither wanting to lose hold.

"It was fun while it lasted, huh," Dib muttered, eyes on the Massive. They floated, sharing breath, in an escape pod designed to look like debris.

"This is _still_ better than everything," Zim insisted, grinning with a fierce predator's maw.

Dib shook his head. "I want to go home."

"You already are."

The Massive exploded. The Empire's heart, herky-jerky gone to pieces.

/**022. Enemies.**

They had a fight, an explosive one, spitting pain like hot grease. Both of them said a lot of things they didn't mean. _I hate you_, and _I should have just died when I had the chance, _and _You were never worth the time I spent on you, _and _When you die, I won't be sorry. _It was ugly and afterwards they separated tumultously, bubbling with bile and shame. They'd fought together, almost died together. Lived together. Stupid to burn bridges with your partner, your lifesaver. But Dib was sore and sad and Zim was learning, and so it happened.

/**021. Friends.**

But it couldn't be denied that they were connected with a thousand clear-shining strings. Both of them remembered things about the other: Zim hooking Dib's pak up to be debugged, opening the panels connecting cables, carefully. Dib lashing out a metal leg to gut the soldier ready to shoot Zim through the back. They _owed_ each other, like it or not, and they'd stick together because neither was ready to let the other just get _away_.

In the end they came back, awkward moments thrashing around between them. Not that they hated each other, but they weren't right together, yet.

/**044. Circle.**

Dib took out his old body and looked at it; stroking soft human cheek with dainty claws, ruffling dark errant hair, nothing recognizable in his eyes. Zim sat on the hard metal bench, watching, speaking to no one in particular.

"If you go back – into _that_ – then you'll die, no doubt."

Dib-that-was-now (sadder, older, colder, smarter, deadlier – worthy of pride) touched gently the face of Dib-that-had-been. He went between looking his body – he touched his pak. "If I don't," he said, (words gentle if tone hadn't cracked like whip) - "then I should just die now. I won't forget _me_."

/**087. Life.**

The night was huge, and full of strangeness and potential. Dib stood, put his human hands on the glass, looked out into purified empty vastness.

Zim looked up at him – strange. Bit softly at his knuckle. "I'm thinking. Back towards the horsehead nebula, there should be some interesting things. I've started us that way already." He felt tentative, not himself. _Want a ship, Dib?_

The human looked bruised, exhausted. He brushed at his hair. He wasn't himself either, still getting his bearings, getting used to being himself again.

He smiled tiredly. He was ready to live.

"Sounds good to me."

/**065. Passing.**

And so they're seen, every once in a while. Human and Irken, wandering together – they don't need to talk, they speak loud enough with body language, but they like to. The like to remind each other they're alive. Sometimes they like to fight. They don't stay around much anywhere, but if they like a place they'll come again, find things to do. The human's about twenty-two – young for his species. Who knows how old the Irken is? Does it matter?

At the back of the human's neck, a link sparks and scintillates like aurora. They'll live forever. Don't doubt it.

**END**

_These are all 100 words. These are also my "something good happens to Dib once in a while" effort, because the poor boy deserves it. Thanks for your time._


	8. Colorless ::TENN TORTURE::

/020. **Colorless**

Meekrob are horrible things. They are energy beings, existing in a constant state of flux; and it hurts to be too close to them for long. Even for an Irken. _Especially_ for an Irken.

_The SIR units given to her had gone horribly wrong - horribly crazy and unstoppable. They were superpowered and STUPID and how could one Invader and her skeleton base hold them all off? Tenn was one of the top Invaders in her class; she'd been sent to Meekrob because of that, but this was - it wouldn't do to send a poor Invader to Meekrob. The planet was a delicate environment, and any lapse in skill might lead to –_

_It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do. This couldn't be happening. Failure was not an option._

The hot energy inherent to the Meekrob "body" structure will disrupt the function of the Irken pak, if it has not been carefully shielded. The effects of exposure were well documented: disorientation, poor motor control, lapses in critical thinking ability as the crackling electricity that animated the Meekrob interfered with the carefully balanced system of the Pak. Tenn had gone through the safety procedure, had laid down on her belly on the operating table to let the outer panels of her pak be pulled away so that under those a buffer could be carefully built around the most important pieces of her, memory and hormone regulation and all the secret things and all the things that kept her alive -

But that was at _home_. In an Irken ship, in carefully-kept Irken space, under the hands of the most highly-qualified technicians turned out by the hatcheries. It wasn't anything - it wasn't anything like _this_ - this dirty invasion, this prying-into of hidden things...

_Stretched out face-down, restrained it what felt like a hundred different ways, she couldn't see. She couldn't thrash. But she could FEEL it, could feel everything quite clearly as, humming protest, the alloy shell on her pak was peeled off. It was the slow torture of having a scalpel inserted into a nerve sheath and then dragged along the fibers - gently. It was a most intimate and horrible form of rape, greasy paws pulling down the frail filmy things that are supposed to PROTECT and making them so useless, so useless, so -_

The self-destruct button was on her left wrist. So close.

She's known it would hurt her to be exposed to the Meekrob without the buffer in her pak, but she hadn't expected anything like this, anything so insidious. She could _feel_ the Meekrob, could tell where they were moving, now: because their energy unleashed an acid bath on her mind. She could tell where they were behind her by what parts of her thought process fuzzed: if she couldn't think coherent sentences, then they were probably floating high and to the left, if memory was shot odds were they were hanging around center-right...

She bit incessantly at her tongue and at the insides of her mouth. It was unstoppable, an animal instinct coming out of dormancy and to the front. When they found her doing it they injected her full of muscle relaxant that left her unable even to lift her head. When they moved her now, they did it as though she were a tired smeet, and Tenn looked up hazily at soft lights through the nebula that was left of her mind. A crackling mantle brushed her face as a scientist moved to float above her, checking vital signs. Meekrob were perfectly clear. Involuntarily Tenn's mouth fell slack and she drooled slightly, feeling it but unable to do anything. Her mind ached and strained towards oblivion, an ingrained death-wish awakened by capture. If they let her up to move under her own power she would tear at her gelatinous red eyes, at her sensitive snug-curled antennae, and then they'd give it up as a bad job and pump her full of sedative instead, allowing her agonized mind to lapse into nothingness.

It was a kind of mercy, at least.

END COLORLESS

_Wanted to write something about a character other than Zim and Dib. I like Tenn (it probably doesn't show), so this came out._


	9. Smell

/036. **Smell**

It wasn't so much that Dib smelled - Zim had been trained to deal with things like that. It was one of the more horrible memories from Invader training, being immersed in the most hostile and disgusting environment ever and forced to endure it for days on end until the Control Brains were _sure_ that poor conditions wouldn't cause their soldiers to break. After that, earth wasn't _so_ bad. It didn't bother Zim that it smelled. It was just what it smelled _like_.

Take a breath, and what do you take in?

Dust, and sweat, and the scent of a slowly-dying race.

Humans. How could they be so oblivious to the stink of their own demise?

Dib stood in the school bathroom after school, wiping up his bloody nose with surgical precision. Zim tiptoed in after him, gagging and glaring about, not touching anything. They did not look directly at each other. Dib turned on the faucet and began to rinse his face. He had - the clearest, strangest eyes Zim had ever seen in an alien, clever and reflective. The still-pool eyes of a growing predator.

His blood stank of rust - the smell was a tenacious one, and it permeated the air. Zim sucked in a breath and made a gritty little noise in his throat when he scented it. The smell was terrible. A simple reminder of what Dib was. A dying thing, a winding-down machine...

Zim growled to himself in displeasure at the thought. He clenched his fists and pinned Dib with a glare. The human's narrow shoulders stiffened and he stuffed two wads of toilet paper into his nostrils before turning around to regard the Invader. "What's wrong with you?" he asked flatly.

Slow rot, slow death, winding down in a closer-and-closer spiral to the Dib. He reeked of it, he stank of his own mortality. Risen from dust and to dust he shall return - and he wasn't even paying attention to it. Dib had the heart and soul of a blind optimist. He was still _confident_, he had the nerve to act _superior_ when every second that passed he sank down a little closer to oblivion and still, still, still he kept along and never had the thought to stop and realize just how _futile_ everything he did was...

What Zim wanted, what he really wanted was Dib on his knees, begging for mercy, words falling and ringing hollow as bells from his mouth. Begging for mercy, pleading to be saved, from the biggest enemy of all, the one running up from behind him, the one that he never looked at, but it was coming at him _fast_-

"You're stupid," he told Dib flatly. He wanted him to realize _everything_.

END 11.23.05

_Pretty much like a non-ZADR version of Not Enough, I know. But lately people have been passing so I've been thinking about things like this - not quite in Zim's way, though._


	10. Breakfast

/**056. Breakfast.**

Dib realized emo had gone too far when even WAFFLES made him sad. Oh, sure, on the surface they were just nice, fluffy waffles, that he'd mixed up himself because he thought that some good solid home-made breakfast food might cheer him up. But the thing was, they reminded him of victory... ZIM'S victories. ZIM, eating WAFFLES, and no one else believing him about it! Oh, the humanity! So instead of eating the waffles that he'd gotten up SPECIALLY to make, he just stared at them on his plate, poking them and brooding. BROODING.

Gaz came downstairs twenty minutes after him. The waffles were cold, the butter congealed; and still Dib sat, glaring down at them as if the bready little pastries had personally offended him. Insulted his head or his mother or something.

His sister poured herself some orange juice and stuck two pop tarts in the toaster. Then she sat at the table with her brother and her game slave, eying him discretely. Dib didn't even look up at her; he just frowned down at his food, beginning to shred the edge of one waffle with a fork.

"Are you going to eat those?" she asked.

"Nnngh."

Gaz raised an eyebrow. "Did Zim infiltrate your bedroom last night and implant a swarming hive of nanobots into your intestines?"

"Nnngh."

...Okay. He was brooding about something. Time to restore Dib to a reassuringly normal level of obnoxiousness by giving him some helpful advice.

"You know, if you mix some of the super-fertilizer Dad's developing with some water and splashed it on Zim, I bet all of the floating spores in the air would leech onto him and grow into a veritable jungle of greenery."

Dib's eyes brightened. He pushed the plate of waffles away and padded downstairs to the basement.

Gaz leaned over and poked at the food. Eww. Congealed butter.


	11. Home

/**090. Home.**

Summer falls into fall falls into winter and they are bringing Dib home, with a scar on his cheek and his ribs showing. He sits at the kitchen table and wolfs Thai food, Styrofoam carton after Styrofoam carton, with blue veins gushing up at his wrists like the fountain of youth or like hope.

"I'm glad to see you," Gaz doesn't say. She comes back down to find her brother flopped out huge on the couch, and her heart nearly stops at how still he is.

Seventeen months in the hospital hooked up to a respirator and a heart monitor and another monitor tracking who-knows-what, and there's nothing left. It's like he's been stripped down and boiled away into a shadow. She can hardly believe he's back, but this might be what happiness feels like.

On the couch, he's only sleeping, and that's perfectly normal. It really is this time. When he gets up three hours later Gaz gives him a hard punch on the shoulder and feels reassured when he yelps indignantly and pushes her back lightly. They order pizza and feast. Before:

"What do you want for dinner?" she asked him.

"Anything is good," he says, stretching his arms out on the table. "I'm hungry, hurry up and order."

"Fine, we'll have pizza," she sniffs, and dials Bloaty's for pepperoni and Canadian bacon.

"It's all good to me," Dib tells her, and puts his head down and smiles.

**End Home**

12/18/05

I thought I'd have a try at letting them be happy.


	12. Parents

/**027. Parents.**

The dual nature of the children he had produced came as a surprise to Membrane - deeply, in his gut, strongly, truly. He hadn't meant to make things so intense, things that took themselves so seriously. Inkdark Gaz and Dib who had lightning licking around his fingers, if only he'd look, and they were both bigger than he was and smaller at the same time. Membrane congratulated himself at his scintillating genius in making things greater than himself, his children, a sort of public service to all mankind – Dib to work for them and Gaz to turn against things that threatened them. He saw himself being superceded by his children, in the future, and - since he had a bit of a taste for self-glorification, he didn't need anyone else's approval, his own was enough – he delighted at making these things that epitomized mankind.

……….

_1/15/06_


	13. Work

/**089. Work.**

Soaked to the elbows in muck from the guts, hair grotty and crunchy with dried blood – and the day is just starting, seven o'clock earthtime, who-knows-what Irktime. Dib discarded the used gloves, snapped new ones over his hands, skin sweating already, so in half and hour or forty minutes the rubber would be slipping over his skin like it was greased. Crescent curve of a suturing needle slips between his fingers – the kind of thing they use for lowtech opps. Zipping up skin where it's been gutted open. That thing. That kind of thing. I don't like it, I don't like it. That's always the way. Nobody asks where the doctor comes from, they're just grateful he's there, with his hard strong hands and his eyes like greased black mirrors. He'd lost one arm (shrapnel), and it felt like a long time ago – but it could've been just a month, who knew? Time narrowed down in here. Nobody asked about it.

Suturing needle – shaped in a growing-moon curve. Thread it delicately, through the eye on the first try. Look, look how quickly he learns this. Another table rolling up, something/body dribbling juices and whimpering and on the screaming edge of life, organs soft vulnerable jellylike commonplace. Insert IV, saline drip, clip skin together and begin to sew. The world is yours, Dib, and it's another beautiful day.

…………

_1/15/06_

_Something with Dib working as a doctor, because I can.  _


	14. When? ::HEAVY ZADR WARNING::

/**079. When?**

Zim had never thought he'd win it all by going to his knees.

Dib tastes bad. Flat and salty at once, too warm, too soft, vulnerable-touchable. Zim sucks his cock with loving attention to detail, the quick-flicking tongue and the feather-scrape of teeth, tenderly lovingly edging Dib over the cliff. Human swallows his pride while Irken swallows his semen - without even choking. _Congrats, Zim, you're a natural. Did they teach giving blow-jobs at the invader academy?_ He's flushed, pulsing with life-rhythm electric, and oh so _ashamed_. Lovely. Zim is shaking with laughter. Next time, he is thinking, when they do this _next_ time, the positions will be reversed.

……….

_1/15/06_


	15. Dogbite

I stop eating when I hear the shouting, because it's not the usual noise; this has an edge of hysteria to it, a tinge of dismay. I brush my hands off, wondering if Zim is up to something. It's doubtful that he'd let his victims make so much noise but anything is possible. The shouts are coming from down near the street and I toss my trash and head in that direction. Once I'm close, though, I can see what's happening; though Zim's there he's not causing the chaos, for once.

Someone's hit a dog on the street in front, then driven on. Probably some damn drunk football player skipping school. Even from here I can see a long smear of red around the animal; it must have skidded when the car hit it. It's lying twisted, legs turned all funny, the back pair look so horribly malformed I can tell they've been crushed by the blow.

"Oh, man," I say out loud. No way that thing's gonna live... poor dog. I almost turn around to go and get a staff member, someone who can put it out of its misery maybe, when Zim turns around and catches sight of me.

He looks at me in a strange way, not like he wants me to be there really but like he's surprised I'm not there already. He looks confused and disturbed, and when our eyes meet his gaze intensifies until it's embarrassing to look at. It's not getting through: the animal's pain, the clamor people are making over it. Pity is something that he, an Irken, doesn't understand. It's pulling at him. He's unguarded and he doesn't know what to do and, God, I should take advantage of this. That's what makes me jog down there instead.

Up close the dog looks even worse. There are flies nestled up close in the clotted blood already and no one wants to touch it and brush them away. Not even the pretty girls with their clean hands and manicured nails that are standing around, cooing pity. Everyone lets me through when I go for the dog – they always let me do the fucking dirty jobs - and Zim follows me, walking around to stand at the other side of the dog. He's still staring at me and it occurs to me that he's waiting for me to do something about this. God knows what. I should start pushing at him but this animal is suffering.

When I kneel down beside it I can see there's no collar. It looks like a pretty mangy animal anyway, runny eyes and tatty ears. I'm not sure if that's good or bad- there won't be any sad families or crying kids tonight because of this dog, but there won't be anyone to remember it either, to love it and feel sorry for it. Except for Zim, maybe – no, probably not – so that just leaves me.

The dog's panting weakly, eyes glassy. Its side heaves up and down, greasy fur glistening with blood. When I reach out a hand it has enough energy to snap at me though. When I withdraw it slumps down again, whining softly.

"Look, Zim," I say, because he looks uncertain and I feel bad for this dumb animal that's dying on the pavement without even having done anything to deserve it. "I don't think there's anything to do. We might as well just let it die peacefully."

He looks at me, eyes deep and raw. He's like a little kid watching his first pet die, and it's awful seeing this vulnerability in him. I want to spit in his face.

"Die?" He says slowly. "On Irk, things don't... _die_."

And he reaches back, and I must be the only person who sees the hatch on his pak slide open, who sees the dark plug he draws from it. He folds the thing between his claws and touches the blunt nose of it gently against the dog's neck. The animal sighs and doesn't move and for a second I think it's because, somehow, it trusts him; and then I'm realizing that it's because it's dead. A sigh - a relaxation - gone.

And suddenly I'm so terrified I can't breathe, because in my head I'm seeing him reaching out and touching my neck with that plug, oh-so-gently, and I'm seeing myself dying that way. A slow lapse of tension, falling over onto the pavement, with no more fuss than the dog made.

The other students are dispersing already. How have they not seen this? "Poor doggie," says one of the girls, tossing her long fair hair. "Poor little doggie." I desperately don't want to be left alone with Zim, poor as the company of my fellow humans is. He's giving me that hungry look again, demanding explanations for this, the pain and the ending. "What do we do with it?" he asks. I think I might be sick.

_First written June 6, 2005. Edited May 27, 2006._

_I like this too much to just abandon it. Probably this will eventually be integrated with a longer piece. For now, I just wanted to show it._


	16. Lovers ::DATR::

The day came on, intimately hot – thick as a wool blanket, planting sticky kisses along skin. The asphalt, the roads, the alleys breathed and pumped and channeled heat. It clogged the mouth and lodged in the throat. Six in the morning and it was a scorcher. Dawn slid a bloody palm across the horizon.

"Sailor, take warning," Dib said, eyeing the encroaching light from his window. Tak, commandeering his computer chair, eyed him coldly.

"What?"

"Oh." Dib turned to her. Pinched the bridge of his nose. Eyes bloodshot, they looked like raw eggs, Tak thought; eggs cupped by purple shadows. "It's an old saying. You know." She didn't. "It means bad weather is coming."

Tak glanced out him – then out the window again. Irken, her eyes gleamed hot, the red-violet of nebulas. "Ah," she said.

Dib was sweating already. She could smell him: the engrained scents of leather, oil, under that his unique human smell. Quietly she inhaled, let the tang melt and settle in back of her mouth. The fine, suede-soft green skin around her eyes wrinkled and her mouth set in a groove of deep hate.

"What's up?" asked Dib.

"It's the heat…"

"Already?" He got up. "Yeah. It is hot. I might go cut watermelon." He'd bought one yesterday, a fresh green fruit, huge and heavy in his arms. Had eaten three pieces already, breaking off the soft pink flesh and gulping it down in chunks. Tak watched, and declined. Ever the observer.

"I might go home," she said. Testing the waters.

"No," Dib said, close on the heels of her sentence. His eyes flickered across her, his gaze a pressure almost tangible. "No. Stay. We can go down to the basement. It's cooler there."

Tak smiled, an inward bitter grin. He always asked her to stay.

…..

In the kitchen he found a knife, hacked away at the fruit. The melon dribbled pinkish fluid across the countertop. Tak shuddered. Closed her eyes. Skin glowing white as milk, hair tossing (it wasn't really there). But Dib looked at her and saw a girl. And a girl only.

He took a piece of melon in his fingers and wolfed it, a big piece, pulping between his teeth. Dib had sharp, even white teeth; a human gene perfectly expressed.

Tak walked up close behind him. Pursed up her falsely human lips and kissed the fishbelly pale patch of skin on back of his neck. Tasted salt. His sweat stung her lips.

Dib froze. Shook in one long tremor that ran from his head to his feet. A young, suddenly aroused figure. He felt vile. Tak kissed him again – no, licked this time. Suddenly he had goose bumps. Was fighting down chills.

"Tak," he said; began to turn to her. She snatched a coarse handful of black hair and faced him forward.

"I'm going home," she said. He could feel her breath washing coolly over his damp skin.

At the door he called after her, "Tak," and she stopped – "Tak, do you really hate it this much?" Looking like a human? Being here? Being with me?

She looked at him. Only a moment. Could still taste salt, the sweetness of it. "I have to go home. It's too hot."

He stood looking after her for a long time.

At home Tak looked at herself. Pushed her face towards the mirror until it was all she could see. White skin. Cropped purple hair. Touched a finger to her beauty mark. Turned the hologram off.

Green skin. Vast purple eyes. Antennae curled snug, and drooping from her head the hypnosis coil.

On. White skin.

Off. Green.

Faster and faster, until the colors blurred together.

_Written as an entry for the 31 days livejournal community - the prompt was "the censorship of my skin". Used as the theme for "lovers" in fanfic100._


	17. Ican'tstoplongingforotherness

The sick thing was, Dib got what he wanted.

"My whole life," he said, "I was waiting for you."

Zim stared at him. Somewhere, something dripped.

"My whole life. I swear. I mean. I knew I was always the weird kid, I guess. So from grade one I knew that I wanted… you know."

Just something – something different. A way out of the box reality made.

Just something.

Zim stared.

"God," Dib said. He'd been dammed up with words and now the levies burst. "Everything here is just stupid! It's idiotic! I mean, these people… they get on to things, STUPID things, and they never stop. You can't stop them."

His voice rose slightly in appeal. "So you know why I had to jump on you when you showed up. Why I couldn't let up. You were…"

The best thing. The one thing. The only _real_ thing.

Dib shivered where he sat. His clothes were wet and sticky. One fingernail was torn and he squeezed bright pearls of blood from it.

"That's just it. That's why. I thought I should… Tak's ship works now. I might load it up and…"

What's left, is the question.

Zim's tongue drooped slightly from the corner of his mouth. Dib stared at him, at the metal imploded star that had been his pak, at the rich red garnets of his eyes. Half-open.

"I waited for you," he said quietly. "My whole life. It could've been so cool. We'd have been awesome together. But…"

But.

Dib's voice dwindled and fell away into nothing.


	18. Sunset ::DATR?::

:// _candles for the dead // sunset_

Tak dug him up remorselessly when Dib went underground. She would not allow him the pleasure of dying alone, thinking escape; he would not disappear like a cat into the woods for a solitary end. She determined to share his last breaths, smell the sour illness in them.

He wasn't too hard to find. Dib wasn't naturally inclined to disappearing without signs of passage. So: he was drinking coffee in a small apartment by elevated train tracks when she found him, nearly unrecognizable - his veins so blue, his skin translucent, like light shining through thin, fine porcelain; his nostrils rimmed red with blood. She surged through his door and sat down on the couch, watching him, tapping her foot, an apparition with white skin and beauty mark stamped under her eye.

"Make yourself at home," Dib grated, with limp, unsurprised irritation. He sat down on the sofa too, at the opposite end from her, because he knew that it would be easier to play along until she got what she wanted, or didn't. "God, it was Zim last time, what do I have to do? I really liked that apartment too. Every time one of you finds me the media goes crazy and my life turns into shit and I have to move again. Can't you two just entertain each other?"

Tak sniffed, edged towards him until she brushed along the sullen warmth of his body, hip bumping hip and shoulder to shoulder. "You're so weak now, Dib. Your security is very poor. I am amazed that your human media has not sniffed you up already. If I hadn't put Zim off the trail he'd have caught up to you again. So," she snapped her teeth, "you owe me. Can't you even defend your base now?"

"Jeez, Zim's a little less creepy than you are – cut that out, cut it out," he said, at her sudden nosing along the keen edge of his jaw. "Leave a guy in peace, won't you? I said no! I don't want to be bothered right now."

"Busy dying on your own? Don't be such a fool, Dib," she said scathingly. "Dib, this is a human vanity, dying. It is unneedful and a waste. It is useless when you could accompany the universe along its lifespan, or live to watch a culture rise and fall."

"It's not," he said greyly. "I know you don't understand. You can't, right?" Gingerly he touched her shoulder. Tak drew abruptly away, disturbed by the boniness of his hand, the loose skin as if his flesh only gloved him and was hardly attached. His finger joints were swollen. He was so diminished. "Dying is a human thing," he said. "It's mine. It's what we do." After everything Dib was still determined to be human.

"You have racial death wish," Tak said sourly. "It is a psychosis and it is treatable. Any Irken could help you. Zim could help you. He offered, yes?"

"Yeah."

Tak's lips drew away from her teeth. "Foolish. You're mine. That's my place."

He didn't say anything, but Dib was easy to read and his thoughts flashed clear on his face: I'm not anyone's.

"Tak," he said at last, "Tak, Tak, this is my thing, okay?" He was looking at a space that did not include her now. "It's a human thing." Which she had heard before. And unsaid: _you wouldn't understand._

Of the naked and painful truths Dib told that was perhaps the worst, and the truest. Tak laid her head on his arm and watched him silently, ignoring the heat of his body as it burned itself to cinders. These memories, forever, would be the last, best thing she would have of him; because she was too proud to scrape up his remains if he would not submit to her hard, attentive consideration. Them sharing his small sofa and watery coffee on a dim April twilight in a skeletal time. These smells and feels and ultimate feathering touches would compress down into the coils of her pak and stay like eggs clustered in the belly of a fish, or red-bead seeds clustered in a pomegranate. It was the weakest thing she had ever seen Dib do, and also the most human: this cleaving to his race, this last rush towards the horizon.

He fell asleep, eventually, and slept with shallow, slightly gurgling breaths. The line of his neck was pale, vulnerable, Tak opened blinds until radiant red sunset-light filled his apartment to brimming, until they seemed suspended in red wine, or blood, or the heart of a ruby. The walls seemed to tremble, and the scream of one mighty engine came louder and louder from the farther tracks, and a train was suddenly screaming by overhead. It was like standing in a hot apocalypse, the sun plunging like an immense hot coal into the earth's distant flank, the thin walls hardly muffling the intense mind-consuming sound. Tak's heart rocked and vibrated in her. Somehow Dib slept still, and she stared directly into the sun until it fell out of sight.

In the twilight Tak let her disguise off at last, crouched next to the couch again, slipped one narrow green palm down Dib's chest to feel the racing flutter of his heart. The beat went on, still, as the flesh shuddered and shut down around it, booming steadily against her hand.

Tak sank her teeth into her lip and flexed her claws. If Dib wanted death she could, she would let him have it, and she would remember him and curse him forever for his last selfishness. No candle but the light that burned in her memory. No headstone but the race that charged on, heedless of what it had lost.

Why settle for a candle, she wondered, gazing out at the muted town, the velvet sky, the streetlights that illuminated the roads in a flaming yellow glow. Why settle for candles, when he could have a bonfire?

END

_February 18, 2007. Yes, I am still working on Souvenirs and Pact._


	19. Teammates

**://026: Teammates. (KH/IZ)**

Dib spread out the map for the palace. "Okay," he said, tracing a finger along the route he wanted. "The main hall is crawling with Heartless, but the secret passage that Princess Piggy Hunter told us about should be clean, so all we have to do is get _quietly_ through the guards surrounding the palace and into the passage and we should be good."

"Foolishness!" squalled Zim, waving his tiny staff around dangerously. "You waste Zim's talents, with this _sneaking_ and _slithering_! We should attack the palace from the front, unless the supposed Key-blade wielder – " - he smirked at Dib - "Is too a-fraaaaid!"

Dib clamped his hand a little tighter around the keyblade, sealer of worlds, emblem of the champion against darkness, and what he privately thought of as 'my doofy club', and glared, overcome with the screaming desire to start punching both of his teammates. All that stopped him was the knowledge that a howling brawl would certainly attract Heartless. "Quiet down, Zim," he growled. "The Heartless will hear you and then we _will_ have to fight."

"Cowardice!" the little mint-colored mage yowled. "What mistake of destiny made you the bearer of the fates of every world?! ZIM is the rightful owner of the keyblade!"

He lunged for Dib's weapon, prompting a loud tussle involving hair-and-antennae pulling, which Dib won by walloping Zim over the head with the unattended staff, which discharged and Thundaga spell into the Irken's body. "Shut up," the young boy panted, scrambling to his feet and leaving his mage teammate twitching on the ground. "Just shut up. I agree. I want to go home. What accident of fate put me in a team to save the world with you two losers?"

Sizz-Lorr, the meat-tank of the team, grunted unenthusiastically. He had turned his knight's shield upside-down, built a small fire beneath it, and seemed to be frying something on the convex metal surface. "You shut up, pale worm," he said. "Shut up and lead us to victory, as King Purple chose you to do."

Dib's left eye twitched. "I suppose it would be too much to ask if YOU had a plan…"

Sizz-Lorr jabbed a sausage-like finger into the human's face. "You. Lead. To victory. Now."

END

I have wanted to draw a Kingdom Hearts / Invader Zim crossover with Dib as a keyblade wielder forever, but I can't seem to manage either writing one or drawing it. However, it would just tickle me pink to see art of KH!Dib with a keyblade, so much so that I am willing to offer bribes for it: you draw it, and I'll write you a drabble request of your choice. Pairing, genre, and oh what the hell fandom: you decide what you like.

A link to your art will get posted in my profile, and in return it'd be great if you could link to the drabble in the description of your artwork. Note me if you have further questions or want to know what fandoms I'll be willing to write for. Suggestions on how to request are LINKED TO in my profile. I recommend that you read these.

6/7/07


	20. Shade

://**075. Shade**

Dib liked the lazy heat of summer, and stayed up all night in it, getting soot-dark rings around his eyes, playing shadow games on his empty wall. In the peace of absolutely early mornings he'd let himself drop off stretched on top of the bed instead of under the sheets. That was too hot even for him. In the very heights of sleep deprivation he seemed to see things crawling in the shadows around his bed. Not threatening, but mysterious with faceted eyes (_sometimes red_) and feathery moth-antennae and velvet-grit skin. Halfway through the day again, when it was good and hot, he'd sink up from the boggy stupor of sleep and wander out to play with Zim. They both liked shadow games, crawling through Zim's base with darkness teeming and squealing around them, getting lost in the muggy blur of eyes and distracting, discretely-living things. Dib never wondered again if he was just seeing things when he watched Zim pause, turn, look into the shadows, then shudder and turn quickly away.

"What are they, anyway?" Dib asked, when he came into his room to find Zim crouched in the window, staring big-eyed with antennae pricked, into under-the-bed shadows.

Both of them, six months ago, had felt the world shift over, flip like a pancake, and be:_ again_. Different. Dib ran his tongue over his lower lip. Tasted salt. Zim didn't believe in souls, or ghosts, but he believed in these things that made him nervous; Dib could see that.

The world seemed different now. Flipped, twisted, inverse: filled with glimmering tiny things that fuzzed peripheral vision. Alive in a very obvious way. Sending out diplomats, dignitaries, to tap at the edges of two heads: Zim and Dib. _Hello, hello. Hear us. Hear me. Sit up and listen. We are talking to you, dust's children..._ _hear us in your minds and souls, hear us in your bones…_

"I don't know what you're talking about," Zim grated back. His hands alarming, twisting and working at the wood, pulling up splinters. Lying. "Crazy human, are you seeing things again?"

Dib took to chewing on his thumb and sitting up on round-the-clock sleepless marathons, waiting for the feather-whisper of their limbs.

END

_Written probably a year ago. Reread it, kind of liked it, decided to post._

_June 26, 2007_


	21. Star ::DATR?::

"What's that?" Tak snapped, after Dib flicked out his light and dropped down the blinds. His room was dim, cast into a sickly glow by his computer monitor and by a pallid green light glimmering in speckles on his ceiling. Tak's pak sharpened her vision so she could see the five-pointed symbol pasted onto the old plaster, took a snapshot of the crude image and compared it to conventional terran motifs before the human even had time to respond.

"What?" Dib said, mostly occupied with shucking his trenchcoat and arranging it over his computer chair. He glanced at her, eyes gleaming like gold foil beneath dark brows. "Oh. Those are just old things. Don't worry about it."

"_Dib," _Tak sniffed. "Don't presume you can evade answering me. What are they." And why are they up there, explain to me.

He sighed, put-upon, but she knew he would oblige in the end. He was pliant if it meant she would give him what he wanted, and stubborn otherwise, taking oblique measures to confound her research efforts as if she hadn't seen similar ploys in Irkens ten thousand times before. "They're just stars, jeez," he grumbled. "Um, human representations of stars."

"Primitive ones," Tak agreed maliciously.

"Sure, primitive representations of stars," he echoed, rolling his eyes. "Anyway, they glow in the dark and kids, you know, they stick them to things..." He looked up momentarily, much taller than she. There was no recognizable pattern in the stuck-on stars, no attempt to recreate constellations; just the random patter of faked celestial bodies. Tak looked at him sharply, and he shifted to look back at her, his face beginning to darken and flush.

She grinned then, and flicked off the hologram. She went to him, pushed him down sitting on his bed, then sat beside him. Her key lime skin, the medicine-reflective eyes, the loop of metal at her temple – she knew it turned him on. Dib's peers called him queer, but in truth he was just such a little xenophile.

"A kid thing, hm," she smirked. "You humans are all children. You liked the stars then too." Worshiped them like pagans from the mud, more like; but all humans worshiped something, snarling little beasts that they were, conjured from mud, blood and snow in a boiling cauldron of a planet.

"Yeah, you could say that," he said. "So maybe stars are the smartest and best things a human can like." It was such a Dib thing to say; funny how he tried to come around as cool, when she could smell and feel the wanting rolling off of him.

A crow of ruthless laughter erupted from Tak's mouth. "Why? All of your problems come from them."

All my pleasures too, Dib said, with a long and slanting look. Enough, Tak decided. Time to do what she'd come to do.

"Those stars, are you a knight." she whispered to him, pushing him backwards and down and slipping one leg across his stomach so she perched on his belly. "A knight for the earth." He looked up at her, wincing with his eyes. She bent down like a heron spearing a fish until their brows touched, her large slightly convex eyes become his purple universe.

Dib shivered and rolled underneath her, like water. Malleable. Flowing. Tak pulled her lower eyelids up a bit; she disliked the reminders that sometimes arose, that Dib could be plebian and boring in his plots to make her falter in her quest for earth and then suddenly erupt into genius, that he was hard to entirely get a grip on even with all the high ground she held. She felt energy tremble in tentative fingers through the hypnosis coil set into her skull. Dib's eyes dilated, huge, until they offered their own universes, and unplumbed depths. Even his eyes were a defiance, a reminder of how tenuous her grip once was, how flimsy it might become again...

"Good," Tak murmured. "Stay like this." She opened her eyes wide again, sliding her palms around and pushing them into his chest, kneading, kneading. He pressed up into her, a small, beseeching noise emerging from his throat, and she ignored that, egging the coil on, eking out every scrap of convincing and drawing-onwards that she could.

"Tak," Dib said, his voice rough, and Tak said, "Quiet." She tightened her lean legs around him, worked his body with facility. Dib was tactile but rarely touched. He had learned pain, from daring to touch; but she'd reward him for it. For daring. For being the blithe, foolish, brave creature he was.

Light and color blurred in slipstream through her head, and Dib stiffened under her, his head snapping back, eyes rolling up and the coil touched him. His hands quivered on her thighs. As a child he'd resisted this, fought off the hallucination she forced on him; now, he wanted it. She wanted it too.

"I'll give you better stars," Tak told him. His throat clicked dryly when he swallowed; Dib was still in thrall to her, would remain so until the dream wore off on its own. She wondered what his vision was: of celestial bodies pleasuring him, brushing like angel down past his face?

Zim was so jealous that she'd gotten into Dib's head first. Tak got off of him and curled into his side, listening carefully to the thunderous smashing of his heart. She smiled a feline, proprietary smile for herself. It was a rare pleasure, to have such a superlative find come to her with, indeed, yearning and compliance. In her life where she'd worked for everything, and had no presents, he was her present: this simple, hungry creature, smeared with blood, choking on dirt, birthed in the cold.

END

August 12, 2007


	22. He ::DibGretchen

://**084. He.**

Awake, Gretchen realized her solitude in bed without needing to open her eyes. Warmth rolled dilute in the sheets, and Dib's smell of chemicals and sweat, as though his ghost whispered beside her.

He was down in the kitchen eating his breakfast. Sleepily she rolled herself out of the sheets, smoothing her hands over her wild hair, already thinking idly of how she'd have to shower before going home so she didn't smell too much like her boy – as though it was fooling anyone, her parents or her older sister, when she was out all night and dragged in at noon most Saturdays, to retreat to her room and study and obsess. As long she wasn't stopped that was all right. Carelessly, she brushed away the flakes of dried semen clinging to her belly and thighs. Last night had been good, Dib had been there was her, totally engulfed in the moment, not the hyper extrovert he could often be. That he was. It was what she loved him for, right?

Her shorts and camisole were on the floor. The morning was peach and rain-sweetened, and she was hungry too.

The Membrane's kitchen was dim and grey, and Dib perched on his table, wearing dust-colored flannel pajama bottoms and setting his feet on a chair. He flashed and darted a knife in his hands like a magician making doves appear, his eyes cast down, long, sooty lashes obscuring his pale eyes and dusting his face with small blue shadows. He hadn't noticed her. Gretchen wasn't a stupid girl, she was smart enough to keep him engaged, some of the time, and she'd done her research; sometimes she wondered if something was really wrong with the wonderful Dib's head. Asperger syndrome or something of the like, some nascent autistic tendency that isolated him into his own brilliant world. Gretchen hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her shorts and watched him make magic.

He had procured an apple too, waxed red bright in his hand, and he was only peeling it, with infinite delicacy. It was like bleeding in reverse: the cold knife slicing through crimson, revealing pallor below.

Gretchen went and touched his ankle, pressing until Dib glanced at her and yielded, lifted his foot and allowed her to slide onto the seat. His legs braced warm around her. Just high enough to set her chin on, Gretchen did so, a curl of apple peel tickling her cheek. The flesh smelled sweet and flushed pink like summer, and private, and Gretchen felt wanting twist a little below her belly. He hadn't spoken to her still, his eyes reflective, introverted; but she was used to that.

"Tell me what you're thinking about?" she asked, wondering if he was contemplating harassing Zim again, or getting himself half-killed in a nebulous quest for something. Dib reminded her more than anything of Don Quixote, a knight in the wrong time and place, tilting at imaginary monsters. She couldn't shake the feeling he'd come to the same sad end too, being the anachronism he was. He couldn't help it, and that was why he needed someone like her.

Dib didn't respond, but his pinky finger brushed her lower lip and she opened her mouth and took a bitter curl of peel between her teeth. Swallowing, she brushed her tongue against his fingers, tasted mild apple-juice and Dib. He held the apple and the knife with one hand, the tender white fruit beginning to cleave in parts. He was a little closer to actually looking at her now. God, you're beautiful, Gretchen thought, lifting her arms, draping them around his calves so her fingers brushed the back of his knees. God, I hope you stay here today, stay here with me.

He'd peeled the fruit all in a piece, and she pulled the rest of the peel slowly into her mouth, not minding that he'd said nothing, like being a girl again, slurping spagetti noodles end-to-end. Dib sliced the apple into six wedges, the seeds still in, and Gretchen felt a deep wave blur her vision hotly as she thought of her teeth breaking up the slices, grinding them to mush, the seeds within bitter with cyanide, like poison, like love.

END

_September 8, 2007._


	23. Heart ::DATR?::

://**047 Heart.**

_Gold is a noble metal, but soft._

Sometimes, late at night, they watched movies together, with the subtitles on because too much noise woke Gaz up and one incident of that was enough for both of them. On the nights where she didn't feel too bad Tak ignored the tacky films in favor of watching Dib watch movies, the lazy way his gaze swept the room, how he fumbled with the tabs on soda cans, the straggling black of his hair; on bad nights, she was glued to the screen, practically memorizing the frivolous exploits of the identical teenage couples that seemed to people the late-night movies, wondering how they could possibly be so happy in their pathetic, thin little lives. So fixated on loving each other when in twenty years tops they'd probably never want to look at each other again, slender young socialites running to fat, the teen heartthrobs with thinning hair and paunches, and one or two squalling brats popped out to grow up and repeat the process again.

And their empty little words, clinking like coins dropped into a beer can, a running tally of sugared-over rot and fallacy: - _Shawn, don't ever leave me again. - Anna, you have a beautiful soul. A beautiful heart, a beautiful mind. I never want you to look at anyone else. Be mine forever._ No, no, no, no, it was all so wrong, so empty - so pointless. Fluid, inconsistent human concepts of things like love or heaven or hell – she was convinced that hell was right there, down with them, the Devil taking a hearty interest in the earth with God blinkered up in the clouds. Nothing so precious as to be untouched. No sacred cows, no secrets, no metaphors; a rose is a rose and a human is made of meat and nothing else.

Dib's ideas were bigger than his body most of the time, but he was a mortal anyway, with a body that ate and wasted, and a heart that beat human. Tak had heard all things, by that time; a mind like fire and a heart made of gold, and she knew none of it was sense, or actuality. Just a backwards human dreaming that was all they had in their self-inflicted darkness.

Tak's pak actually contained some gold, flattened to a super conductive foil that was sandwiched between layers of finely-etched silicon, but she had no use for it other than that. Gold heart? It made no sense. _ Only more evidence that the entire human race was crazy._ Dib always sat a little too close, so she could feel his body heat radiating outwards.

"The human race will be happier once the Irkens arrive," she'd snapped at him once, and he'd gotten so angry that he'd thrown her down his stairs, the only time (so far) he actually lifted his hand in violence to her. "The human race, and you, too." Irken leaders would know how to sandblast away that faux spirituality and make good from the simian race they'd run across. Dib was proof, that a human could be logical, although even he faltered sometimes. Still clinging to his ideals and abstract concepts and desperate optimism.

"Why gold?" she asked once.

"Dunno," he replied, fiddling to open his soda. He never looked like he was paying attention but when she turned around fast she could see how he watched, how he jumped and withdrew. Dib wasn't afraid of her but he was cautious and that reassured her that he smart enough to be worthy of her respect and time.

"People think gold is special. Back a long time ago they fought over it all the time."

"So a heart of gold is exceptional somehow?"

"Yeah."

"_Why_? Gold is a useless metal. It's soft, it can't be worked into anything, it can't -"

"I know, I know, I _know_." He glared. "It was because it was rare. There's religious symbolism. The shining light of heaven, or something. It's just a stupid traditional human thing. I _know_." Dib didn't like his race either. But after seventeen years of living with them he'd come to accept, somewhat the various stupidities and flaws that marred humanity. Tak hadn't learned to do that yet and hoped she never would.

It wasn't so bad, the idea of being on earth for the rest of her life - not so bad, at least, if she didn't think too hard about it, think about how Dib was likely going to die in sixty-seventy years or so. Probably sooner, the way he drove himself, and what would she do without her top specimen, to demonstrate to the Tallest why she'd bothered with this planet? _He didn't fear it_, which was what got to her: he didn't think of any of it. He was too focused on the pain in the moment - even Dib, the best of them. He gave up vulnerabilities like he was throwing confetti and _he was the best opponent the humans had to offer_. And he sat with her like she was harmless, even when he knew the truth. He gave away information. He gave her tools to use, grips to hold, without even realizing it - she had his soft-metal heart in her hands and knew that Dib was a fool, that he'd sealed his own fate by giving it to her. The true heart of gold: noble, sacred, and soft as butter, enough that the careless seizing of her hand could warp it forever.

And he thought, maybe, giving her his heart was safe. He thought she would hold him and no calamity would come. But the softness of his heart wasn't what made him worthy to her, and she thought, someday soon, she might smelt it down to the ore, remold it, and devour.

_September 21, 2007._

_This has gone through so many goddamn rewrites. Seriously._


	24. Spirit ::Sap::

The field was hard and barren and bumpy and grey. It stretched far into the distance, until the mounds of earth were obscured by trails of mist. It was getting on evening, and cold; the sky was acrid orange and cast a sickly light down on the earth below.

Zim rammed his shovel against a rocky hummok. The crusted earth crumbled only a little against the blade; he kicked it in deeper and levered out a block of dirt. It was a hard, primitive, _human_ way to go about doing this. Zim absolutely hated it. That was also why he still did things this way.

"You're not being very fucking _helpful_, Dib," he snapped to the air, gouging vengefully at the ground. Once he was past the hard outer layer of soil the going became easier; the dirt was softer, crumbly. Still dead, though. Dead and bone dry.

There was a shift in the mist cloaking him, a slight movement. The atmosphere on the dead planet was always strange. Sometimes, occupied with digging, Zim would think he heard jeering human laughter. At others he'd hear squalls, shrieks, the kind of noises made by creatures driven past rational thought by pain. This fog made things strange, that way, blurred the lines between what he knew to be true and the potential held by the universe. Almost imperceptibly, the mist began to thicken around him; the particles of vapor took a more distinct shape.

"It's been another year," Zim said. "I'm so sick of this place. You stupid little beast. Why won't you just die already, for real? So I can get out of here."

The shape was thin and misty, but identifiable even so. Zim thought, even if his pak was half-dead and his eyes were missing, there'd be something recognizable about that shape. He'd spent too much time and too many years studying it not to know it... Dib in watercolor shades of grey. Dib, with none of the vibrancy he had once possessed, as solemn as one of the old human photographic plates. Dib, still, unchanging, dead.

Ghost Dib crouched close to Zim and rested his pale chin in his hands. He sat near to the tree Zim had brought, the tree that he had grown in the floating lab for just this occasion. It was a good tree, a sapling, young and strong, with a trunk about as thick as a young man's arm – maybe about as thick as Dib's arm around the bicep, should the ghost decide to reach out and compare. The limbs were slender, almost spindly, but resilient. It was covered with bright green buds.

"I died a long time ago," the human boy said into his hands. It was true; it had been three hundred years now that his bones were dust. Possibly more. He had died at thirteen, had remained thirteen for all those years; he would stay thirteen forever. "I died a long time ago. Please Zim, please; stop hating. I could let go if you could." He was crying like a live thing, shaking, his eyes puffy and his nose running. "Please," he said again. "You've got me pinned. You win, okay? Really. I can't leave while you still hate me like this. I can feel it all the time now. Pulling me beyond. I want to go."

Zim had finished the hole. It wasn't too deep, it was dessicated and sterile, but it would have to do. The thin orange light was beginning to die. He dropped the shovel and went to pick up the tree, hefting its weight easily. He had to walk through Dib to do it; the ghost felt funny, like a combination of static electricity and the mist he'd formed himself from. But there was nothing the boy could do to him. He'd tried before, and failed, as troublesome to Zim as a breeze brushing his antennae, and eventually he'd just given it up as a bad job.

Dib drifted after the tree, the only live thing other than Zim on the plain. His eyes were pitiful, colorless from centuries of no hope, and they drank in the sight of the green leaves and silvery trunk. Zim dropped the sapling into its hole and knelt to untangle the roots. He packed the grainy dirt back down around it and stood back to look at his work. The tree stood straight against the clouds, the crown reaching proudly upwards, trying to brush the appearing stars. The only monument to earth's last defender. A fitting one, he thought. The live, young things seemed to draw Dib, who apparently was allowed to range the earth where he had died. A lucky break, that, because Zim probably never would have been able to find the child's original house, much less his neighborhood... The ghost had never followed Zim up to the floating lab, at least, for which the Invader was grateful.

What a lonely place the planet was now. And so cold without the creatures that warmed it.

If it were possible to redo time... Zim wished he hadn't dropped the bombs. He missed the life on earth, although it had hated it while it flourished; at least it had pushed back the consuming darkness of space, which gnawed year after year at the boundaries of his base and his sanity like a hungry, slopping sea... He didn't think he would be able to make it back to Irken territory if he tried. And oh, he was so lonely, almost mad with loneliness. He needed a fight or a loud rival or... GIR had broken down long ago, even the base's computer AI was deteriorating. And he only saw Dib once a year.

"Zim," Dib pleaded. "I think I could go now, if you let me. I could... I could move on. I want to so much! I even..." -he looked around bitterly. "I even forgive you for this. I mean, what can I do about it now?"

The boy shuddered. "I can't even go anywhere. I can't move off this planet. It's really lame, huh? Being a ghost and not even being able to fly?"

Zim glared downwards. His fists clenched and opened again and again. _Oh you CREATURE... you filthy stinking HUMAN... you DARE plead for freedom when Zim has none himself? You have the NERVE to ask your enemy for favors?_

"Please," Dib whispered. "Please. It's all I want."

Zim threw his head back. He grabbed his antennae, one in each hand, and yanked them downwards; brutally hard. "No, no, no, no NO!" He screamed. "You think your work here is DONE?! You think this fight is OVER?! NO! As I am trapped YOU will remain! You filthy creature, how can you ASK for this of me! This is all I have left!"

He lunged for the tree, for the limber, graceful young sapling he had just planted. His claws scored the bark until it wept sap, until the green and living wood was torn to splinters; he tore off the delicate branches, he pulled the soft green buds to pieces. Dib screamed at the destruction, and leapt at him; but there was nothing that a figure so insubstantial could do to still the Irken's rage. Static and mist touched his skin. The sounds of rending wood filled the still air. At the last he took the trunk in a two-handed grip and tore it from the earth, roots dangling; and he dropped it on it's side, lying as something dead. Dib dropped to his knees beside it, crying in nasty wet gulps, unashamedly. When he looked at Zim his gaze was inflamed, accusing... He was still trying to pick up the delicate leaves, plucking ineffectually at the shredded greenery with incorporeal fingers. Zim panted. He felt as though he might faint. He felt no pleasure looking at the boy's hysterical shade... he felt his years, all of them. Heavy.

Slowly, Zim bent his head. He turned as though he were dying and walked away from the scene of his crime. Dib's pathetic, moist noises followed him, invaded his brain. Zim began to jog, then at last he broke and ran for his ship.

As the pod lifted away he fancied he could see the torn remains of three hundred other saplings. Over three hundred years earth had been dead, over three hundred trees had been set in the earth to grow; for minutes only. What a sick, sad ritual. He wondered if someday... someday...

It was going to be a long year.

END

_June 2, 2005_

_Redone: September 22, 2007_

_I like this piece a lot, and wanted to update it a bit. For Red Crow, still._


	25. Lightning ::Polaris Run::

_The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood_

_Until his body smothered him, until his being felt the need of soaring, the need_

_Of air..._

Wallace Stevens

Death was not the worst moment of Dib's life. Those had come and gone long before. It might have been said, in fact, that death was his greatest moment ever; it allowed his soul, already stretching the boundaries of his frail body, to erupt and go free. It left the confining lump of flesh in a leaping crackle of blue energy, rejoicing, while the part of it that was Dib's conscious was still thinking _What? What?_, and went bounding and steaming and shaking about the room, spitting exultant azure sparks. It slid through substance, unfettered by the world of matter that no longer had hold over it, and moments later it went screaming upwards, through dirt and grass and atmosphere to bound into the openness of space.

Zim came up from where he had taken shelter behind a computer bank. He shook his head, eyes dazzled with blue lightning, and made his way to where Dib's crushed body lay between two metal coils. The human looked diminished now; there was nothing in his wiry frame to distinguish him from the rest of his race. No hint at the power that had been in him, nothing that let you imagine what he had been. The tightly-wound energy that had made him strong had sprung to pieces. The volatile soul had fled. He looked like nothing now – just a meatpuppet, something that hadn't mattered in the end, or not really.

But as the alien looked closer, he could see that there was no pain on Dib's face. No grief or fear. He looked as though he had just seen something wonderful and was waiting, breathlessly, for it to come closer.

Thousands of miles away already, Dib's soul raced through space, headed for Polaris. He was hearing the murmur of the universe around him, and looking forward to what would come next.

END

_Originally completed June 10, 2005. Cleaned up a bit: September 22, 2007._


	26. If ::Existential Angst::ZADR::

From the beginning of time, humans have pondered essential questions about their lives. _What's the meaning of the universe?_, they've wondered, and W_hat is love? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I fall down the stairs and no one is around to see it, should I still be embarrassed? Why does my cat always wake me up at three in the morning for no reason at all and keep meowing until I pay attention to it?_

It's all about verification.

…

You get up morning after morning and hope something has changed. But it doesn't; your life's a stuck record, playing the same notes over and over again. How is it even possible to be feign hopefulness at this point, when this is all there is?

The lower base is sealed off and dead. GIR forgets what he is more and more each day. He hasn't taken the dog suit off in a week; he eats kibbles and garbage (though that isn't really new) and pretends to piss on fire hydrants.

Zim sits in his kitchen and tries not to look at the ruins around him. He eats some chocolate-chip cookies instead.

A man named Schroedinger put a cat in a box and poison ready to trip at the decay of an atom outside, and postulated that since death or life was random under these conditions, until you opened the box the cat could be either. Looking at it made it real.

Looking at each other makes it real too.

Dib woke up when he felt the mattress shift. Noise never jolted him out of sleep, but movement did- pressure on his skin, being shaken, jolted, the legacy of surviving several midnight ambushes. He rolled slowly and carefully out of the warm indentation his body had made, and looked into Zim's disguised eyes. The contacts didn't hide the red very well, and pepto-bismol pink showed at the corners of them.

"Get up," Zim muttered to him. Dib rolled over to his belly, slid his hand under and into his pillowcase, caressing the cold smooth metal of the folded blade he'd hidden in there. He took it carefully in his hand and drew it out, hiding the blade with his palm. Then he stood up, looked out his window, out into the night. The sky was salted with stars.

Years upon years with pressure on both of them, forging them into beings as hard as diamonds. Days without anyone else talking to you except _him_, the only person who acknowledges your existence or looks at you in any meaningful way. Even if it hurts all the time. Even if it isn't ever anything _good._ Under conditions like that, what do you do? Do you stand up to it until you break, until you can't do it anymore? Or do you warp and bend and go with it because it's _all you fucking have?_

It was all about being seen.

They never talked to each other when they had sex, and they were very quiet, because neither of them wanted to wake Gaz up and face her wrath. They never looked each other in the eye- it would have been to intimate, too close for what they were doing, and both of them knew (_somewhere, on SOME level_) that they were too knotted up in each other already. They breathed into each other, put fingerprints on skin - left a trace of passage. _I want you_ wasn't right, because both of them desperately wished that they DIDN'T want the other. _I love you_ was out of the question.

_I need you_ might fit. They rolled together on Dib's bed and the human tucked the alien too close to him, closer then he liked, under his guard because the bloodrush and terror with having Zim_ right there next to his heart_ gave him some kind of delirious high, and thought about the knife in the pillowcase under his head.

What both of them dreaded the most was the thought of going back to the beginning, where there was solitude, and echoes when they shouted but no response.

_Look at me. Touch me. Make sure I'm alive._

If somebody dies alone in the middle of the night and never notices he's gone or has someone else notice he's gone, has he really existed?

_Please please please don't make me go alone._

END

_Written 9/30/05._

_Edited 10/1/05._

_And then again 9/22/07._

_Thanks for reading!_


	27. Yellow

**://013. Yellow.**

His hands seize up and he glares, unafraid. Unsurprising: because uncertainty, nervousness, even moments of white-hot clear-shining terror had all been possessed by Dib, but he's toughened up over time and he never scared easy.

Zim throws back his head and laughs until it tears him. "Do you think this will help you?" he asks, rich and dark, and Dib, the perennial hero that he is, grinds his teeth a little tighter and stays still.

"If you think you can stop me with this..." he says, the sentence groping for its completion, left dangling like the uncaught tail of a tiger. Zim knows that this is what will kill the boy someday, because Dib's all flash and powder-bang, out quick. It's his courage (and his ruthlessness) and his fire that will burn him.

Zim knows: it's not cowardice that has ever caused Dib problems.

10/12/07


	28. Triangle ::ZADATR::

**://042. Triangle.**

"Nonsense," Zim snarled, glaring over Dib's shoulders at the female Irken sprawled by the human's other side. "Your filthy lies will not baffle ZIIIIM, for his is clearly the body which pleasures the Dib more!"

Tak propped her head one one hand, brushing her other wrist lightly along Dib's back. "What a fool you are, Zim," she sneered back. "You amateurish touch contains nowhere near the expertise required to adequately please a human. Allow me to demonstrate." Her hand wandered south.

Dib buried his head in his pillow, trying to ignore both of his... demanding... lovers. "You two," he grumbled, breathing in sharply as Tak's claws scratched lightly over a particularly sensitive zone, "have no concept of human stamina, clearly. Cut it out both of you and let me sleep."

The female Irken leered like the horribly smug succubus she was, throwing one lean leg over his body and straddling Dib's ass. "Come on, human," she crooned, tracing the indentations of his spine. "Prove your worth to the Irken invadaaaargh-"

In a flash Zim had heaved her aside and taken her place, grinning victoriously at Tak, sprawled furiously across the floor. "Prepare your body for PLEASURE, DIB-BEAST! Pleasure of a magnitude NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE!"

"JEUMPH CHRISHT," Dib yelled, his exclamation partially muffled by his pillow. He threw himself backwards. Zim pitched off with an indignant squall. "That's it, I am done here, YOU TWO COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER, I am sleeping in the bathtub!"

He rolled off the bed and RAN for the apartment's tiny bathroom, pillow clutched firmly to his chest, knowing that he had seconds, _seconds only _before one or the other of them caught up to him. Astoundingly he made it to the bathroom before they did and slammed the flimsy door in both their faces. An audible squabble erupted outside as Zim and Tak began the fierce debate of who would smash the door down.

Probably the neighbors would complain about the noise again... Dib opened the cupboard under the sink, retrieved the stash of extra clothing he had secreted away for situations like this, and dressed. Then he flipped on the shower for noise camouflage and began to work the small window open.

Of course they picked it up, Irkens had sensitive hearing. "THERE WILL BE NO ESCAPE, DIB," Zim roared from the other side of the door. "WE ARE ON THE THIRTY-SECOND FLOOR. YOU ARE DOOMED TO ACCEPT THE LOOOOOOVE OF ZIM."

Biting his tongue lightly, Dib slid his lanky form out the window and clung like a gecko to the brickwork. Zim was wrong; there was a pattern of protruding bricks, easy enough for him to take advantage of. He reached down with one leg, snugged his toes and the ball of his foot in carefully, and reached down with the other leg. Damn his appreciation for the great view of the city, which was what had appealed most about this living arrangement... he could've had a ground floor apartment, and been far away by now...

There was the telltale CRRRUNCH of the door being blown open in the bathroom overhead. The damage cost would probably be horrible, from the sounds of that. Inwardly, Dib cringed.

He'd thought that a threesome might make things _less_ complicated.

END

10/19/07


	29. Snow ::ZADR hints::

**://067. Snow.**

The snow began that morning, to the rapture of the deluded skoolchildren and Zim's extreme dismay.

"It will melt by lunch," was Bitters' dire prediction. "This happens every year and _hundreds die_ in the resulting black ice epidemic."

And yet, even with their teacher's assertion of doom, the glee of her charges remained irrepressible. Zim and Dib were the sole exceptions to the yowling frenzy of enthusiasm, the former because he had an all-embracing hatred of earth weather conditions and the latter because he had bigger things on his mind.

Nevertheless, out the kids poured come the recess-hour, catching the Invader up in the torrent. Zim only extracted himself from the deluge at the last moment, when he managed to fall back with the stragglers. He whirled away as his slower classmates descended upon the playground with squealing abandon, grinding the source of their happiness to slop within moments.

Zim sputtered with disgust at them all, and retreated to the benches. A space was claimed with one imperious arm-sweep to clear away the powder, and in a moment he'd hopped up on the damp wood to perch and glower at his supposed compatriots. Under the trees, the snow cover was a little lighter, which was a boon to him. The children were pelting each other with snowballs now, the slowest ones victimized by their more robust peers, pushed sprawling onto the ground, ganged up on, and forced face first into the the growing drifts. Bloody noses abounded and indignant howls echoed through the playground equipment. Zim shuddered, glad he had distanced himself early. Pathetic.

Appreciating his own superiority got a little old after a while, not that Zim would admit it, and he began to pay more conscious attention to his usual surveillance patterns, scanning the playground for deviant movement patters that might denote a larger skirmish or disturbance. And, of course, keeping an eye out for Dib, which was basically a prerequisite whenever he was out in public anywhere. He hadn't noticed the worm-child amongst the victims, which meant that Dib had separated himself early from the crowd as well.

The snow began again, lightly at first, but the flakes soon became larger, fluffy like angel down. Zim brushed irritably at them when they settled on his wig and skin; if he let them melt it stung. In spite of how obnoxious that was it was also a little relaxing. He would have been more worried and alert if conditions had conspired to make him feel totally secure. The skoolchildren had broken up from their slush war and were mostly standing around with their tongues out catching pieces of snow. A few kids kicked lazily back and forth on the swing sets, heads tipped back to nab snowflakes as well. Sound was swallowed up, and vision.

In spite of that he heard the footsteps as someone approached – Dib, naturally. Only Dib was obsessive enough to be concerned with him in the light of this sudden windfall. Indeed, his native rival came in at an angle, enough so that Zim had to turn to keep him in sight, but not so surreptitiously that it looked like a sneak attack. The boy's normally pale cheeks were rosy, his hair dampened in unruly feathered spikes to accompany the larger cowlick. "You know, space boy," he began, "any normal human kid would be out there playing with the rest of them. It's pretty suspicious to be just sitting out here alone."

"Tuh!" Zim snorted derisively. "The explanation is simple. I prefer to 'people-watch'." He made sarcastic air quotes with his fingers at the phrase. He couldn't imagine how anyone could derive interest in observing those crawling ants...

"Hah," Dib said, shortly, tone rich with cynical humor. He actually had the nerve to come closer and brush off a spot for himself next to Zim – well, on the other end of the bench, really, but more than close enough for Zim's comfort. The Irken's eyes narrowed slightly as he analyzed Dib's posture, the human slouching lazily, hands in his pockets, face seemingly turned towards the ground but his gaze still trained on Zim. Non hostile, at the moment, wary but not looking for a fight, other than perhaps a verbal skirmish. Well, Zim could easily oblige; Dib's non combative moods towards him were few and far between, and the human could be forthcoming sometimes, to Zim's advantage. The Irken waved lazily towards the other children. "Any normal human, eh?" he mocked, mimicking Dib's sing-song tone. "Why aren't you out there yourself, then, worm."

"Oh please," Dib said, a slightly arrogant smirk gracing his face for a second. "Loners are evil, don't you know? And someone has to make sure you aren't plotting anything. A snowball fight would be too easy, anyway."

"Eh," Zim said, shaking the snow off again distastefully. "I suppose. This stuff is dis_gus_ting anyway, it grows around germs and dirt and things, and you little wormbabies _eat_ it like candy... disgusting."

By now, Dib's dark hair was spangled with snowflakes, and his trench coat well-dusted. The delicate spokes of the individual flakes (where they hadn't been incorporated into the larger snowflake-collectives drifting down) were visible against the pleather, and the delicate arms which branched off of them as well. The clarity of their form, sitting on a warm human, surprised Zim, but the flakes which rested on Dib's skin and hair were slowly dissolving into anonymity... The white sky had an opalescent quality, like radioactive milk.

"Well, maybe," Dib granted. "But I kind of like it anyway."

An unguarded admission – rare, always interesting. Zim was turning over the connotations in his mind when Dib made his move. The Invader tensed as Dib took his left hand out of his pocket, reached out, and turned his small palm up.

The snow was heavy enough now that it seemed to isolate them on the bench, in the trees. Dib caught a flake almost immediately, and in similar quickness it melted down in his warm hand.

For a second, Dib turned and looked at Zim directly, the expression on his face hard to read – but his eyes surprisingly deep and sad behind his glasses. Then he seemed to dismiss the alien. Very deliberately, he took his hand to his mouth and quickly licked the fluid from his palm.

Zim stiffened. "Disgusting," he whispered, or thought, not knowing which. Dib looked at him again.

"Well, maybe," he said. "But I'll live with that."

Easily he hopped off the bench, the snow lapping up to his thin ankles. An attack - ? Zim shook his head violently, pulled himself together fast. Then the bell calling them back inside screamed. Zim nearly screamed himself, it gave him so much of a turn.

Dib seemed to know without looking that Zim had been startled. "Take a chill pill, space boy," he said, and then began trudging back towards the skool doors with his head low. At every step he shook snow off his boots. It was deep enough, and Dib small enough, that he had trouble walking easily. Zim narrowed his eyes and glared after him. _Don't like it so much now, do you._

The Irken stayed sitting for a few minutes more, wondering, thinking what that had all been about. The snow still came down in piles, heavy and occluding as velvet, and although he didn't know it, the exchange would return to haunt him for the rest of his long life: Dib's pallor and the flash of his tongue, and the drops of water gleaming in his hair like stars.

10/23/07.


	30. Orange

**://012. Orange.**

He circled his target first, analyzing his plan of attack from all angles – until, confident, he closed in. It was time for the end of this stalemate at last.

A pakleg extruded and he stabbed it neatly through his target, nearly puncturing all the way through in on careless blow – he hadn't meant to do that, apply so much force, but this was his first time trying such a thing, after all...

Another panel on his pak clicked open and Zim used it to hold his victim still as he effectively gutted it. Soon the floor was slick with fluid, the air redolent with a strong, moist scent. Stringy guts squished between his fingers and Zim grimaced, lashing out with the spur at the end of one of his legs to carve the jagged outline of a pair of glasses around inhumanly wide eyes.

Pleased with his handiwork, the Irken stood back and grinned ferociously. He had mastered the stupid human tradition – that would show Dib!

Undaunted, the jack-o-lantern grinned emptily back.

10/28/07.

_Um... happy Halloween._


	31. Writer's Choice: Aerial Wanderlust

**://097. Writer's Choice: Aerial Wanderlust.**

How dull and cold the great depths of space are - humans, Irkens, Vortians, all forget the madness-inducing size of it. How the blackness seems to glare, and the points of stars bristle around; the great gravitational forces that hammer and tear at ships. How weak life comes to feel, with souls bundled up together like orphans in a garret - lives tossed in a sack and thrown into the vast airless ocean, hanging on to their planetoids and moons, their planets, their ships, growing and teeming like tumors. Like a disease, rust, a growing blemish, born to be obliterated.

What uncharacteristic thoughts. What desperate, clutching philosophy.

Tenn shuddered, silently, as the old security doors screamed open with agonizing slowness. Down here the planetoid-cum-space station was poorly lit, and damp with a planet's sweat. Water dripped steadily around them, droplets condensing until they were heavy enough to fall.

Her companion held steady, calm in spite of the mild danger surrounding them, not even the betraying nervous tremble of an antennae at the droplets which fell precariously close to where they stood. Tak must have been used to this place. From what Tenn had gathered she came down here a lot, after all; though perhaps not by this route. The doors they faced betrayed no signs of common usage.

Surreptitiously, Tenn glanced over at the other soldier. Tak's bearing was military and erect, her hands clasped firmly behind her back and her shoulders low. Tenn could only see slightly, at this angle, the retinal scarring that dappled Tak's right eye with white - "The result," she had told Tenn earlier, "of an altercation with a human of my acquaintance, whom you will meet shortly."

Tenn had heard of this human, and wondered why Tak would tolerate such a branding mark from him, and such resistance besides. She's been impressed by her own Meekrob but humans were different things entirely, savage, sub-Irken little beasts. She'd asked why every new recruit had to come in and see this child, and Tak had smiled and said with dark wryness, "Otherwise, he gets bored."

"We keep him concealed down here," she'd said also, "to protect him from assassins, and because he couldn't survive without the shielding." The logic of the latter point Tenn could see; radiation came down hard on this little chunk of rock, with the atmosphere shredded away and the machinery riddling the planet-core thin. It was a stronghold held mostly because the Empire didn't really care enough to wrest it away. The necessity of keeping the boy from assassins, however, was incomprehensible to her. He was a pet, a mascot. Who would bother to kill a pet?

The door finished its rattling opening, and air breathed out, warmer than the air around them and heavy with an unfamiliar odor that nevertheless Tenn immediately identified: _human. _Something of salt, rust, decay in that, blood and some feral awareness forsaken by Irkens.

He knew, then, that she was coming.

"Go," said Tak, unfolding her hands and gesturing Tenn forwards. Something mocking, in the grandiose gesture, in the dim light of her eyes? "He's all yours."

Tenn, obediently, went.

* * *

The hall turned sharply before letting out into a large room, a quirk of architecture which happened to provide some privacy for the occupant, she presumed. The room was stunningly bright, brighter than an Irken's preference. Tenn squinted slightly, her eyes flooding with thick tears. The boy was quite visible, although his details were indistinct, sitting quite comfortably at a small table in what appeared to be an Irken suit. He had a glass of water, resting casually in his hand.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Dib."

"So I've heard," she said cooly, stepping forward and blinking hard until the moisture receded and her vision was clear again. This was not entirely in her favor, she decided; clarity of vision allowed her to see how his eerie gaze dwelt on hers. His eyes were dots, not like real eyes; more like the simple photosensors possessed by the semi-sentient plant-beasts from Tenebria or the carnivorous flatworms of Carnivoric. Disgusting... Dead white patches surrounded those eyes, and Tenn found herself stiffening as she came closer to him, fixing a suspicious gaze on the slack pose of his body, the glass of water he held.

The corners of his mouth flexed up as she came closer, and he leaned forward, gesturing towards the other rickety-looking seat. Gingerly, Tenn took it, perching on the edge of the chair and returning to her study of the human. Beyond the eyes, she could see he was almost Irken-lean, thatched with scruffy dark hair, and pale, nothing like her own ripe green.

He leaned towards her, not away, and took a slow drink of his water. She could feel his warmth and the sweep of his breath caressing her, and tapped her claws uneasily on her arm, feeling irritable and somehow uncomfortably delicate in spite of how she was sure she could decimate him within a second if she had to.

"So," he said finally. "You're Tenn, I guess."

"Yes."

"Everyone comes down here and talks to me," he told her, "Before they're placed somewhere else. I vet them, see where I think they'd go well."

Tenn carefully quelled her surprise at his free acquisition of such liberties, but he must have seen something, or expected it. The same smile Tak had shown, he gave to her. "Startled?"

She blinked, slowly – yes, she was.

"Why are you here, Tenn?" he said. "What made you abandon your empire? Why turn to us? You're an Irken. You hate humans, you hate other races. Why?"

She did not look down. She did not glance away from his sunken, flat eyes. "The empire has stagnated," she recited. "The empire is no longer my empire. Irken society rots inside to out, smothered under its own weight, crushed by the hidebound traditions and caste system enforced by our Tallest and the control brains - "

"So, you're pretty good at quoting our propaganda," said Dib. "But come on, Tenn. You were an Invader. The Irken Empire's chosen! You would turn away from that... for an _ideal_?"

Tenn pursed her thin lips. "Yes," she said. "For the empire I once knew, I would."

"What a perfect loyal dissenter you are," he said mockingly. "For your people you'd give up your honor? Everything that means something to you?"

"Yes," she said, nearly snapping at him. "Yes, I would!"

He smiled, and Tenn felt wariness swell.

"Okay," he said. "So would I."

Tenn did blink, then.

"You think only Irkens are capable of perspective?" he said, leaning back and sweeping his narrow fingertips in a circle on the scarred table-top. "You think you're the only species that knows how to give things up? I started my own war at eleven... Tenn. Against one of your own. Irken drones get prepped more than I did, when I had to fight for the first time."

He did not seem regretful, only pitying, and Tenn recalled that records confirmed this – even though it was Zim, hardly a grade-A threat, he had started the battle young. In the terms of his kind, at any rate. And now he looked over her head, into some invisible distance. "These people, they're all mine, y'know," he said. "All my people here? I talk to everyone, and see if I want them. And they know who they follow."

When had those pale eyes become so piercing? A rare color, like thin-beaten gold. Tenn stilled, meeting that gaze. What was he telling her – it was impossible, it was, wasn't it? To be true. This mental eunuch leading a battalion.

"This is a personal war," he said to her, almost whispering. "You know how long I've been fighting."

"Fifteen," she said at his pause, "of your years."

"Yeah. And you know, those fifteen years?" He glanced around. "Most of them, it's been down here."

"I know."

"Of course." He narrowed his eyes at her. "I'm sure you've been kept current."

"I'm no traitor - "

"Of course not, no traitor to your empire, not if you're here to kill me." He smiled darkly, and Tenn kept her eyes hard on him, in spite of the temptation to let her gaze wander. Down here, fifteen years – living in this little space? Pressure doors at the back of the room, perhaps leading into a sleeping space and a cleansing area, and this place here, for working. A grim life. A narrow little cage, even for an Irken.

He was protected, she was sure, in ways she couldn't yet see; or he wouldn't be this confident.

"So what will you do, Tenn?" he said. "_Invader _Tenn. You still have your title, I guess? Are you going to crawl back to the fleet a failure? Are you going to take a shot at me here?"

At his smirk she knew she'd guessed correctly, he was defended. To take such a bold approach to an enemy - ! Somehow, though, in some way, not enough, not to neutralize what she carried. She still had her chance...

"What do you fight for, human?" she asked, and the look on his face was familiar: the smug confidence of a successful marksman.

"Not for annihilation," he said. "I'm no Irken. I'm not on a campaign for genocide here. What I want..."

He looked shadowed, fragile, very young even in his alienness. "A sky again," he said, at last. "For starters. That wouldn't be bad."

"I see," she replied. Something had to be said, to a statement like that, and when she looked at him again she thought of her pak: her pak and the neat little job the technicians had done, working with the core generator, introducing a nonvolatile instability until it would take a thought only to bypass all her fail-safes and trip the device into an explosion that could take out the whole station.

They'd know, they must have; that this strange creature here was the leader, the visionary who pulled his soldiers in his wake. Dangerous, Tenn thought, a ridiculously overconfident risk, all the power vested in this pale child here. And his likewise ridiculously risky self... all it would take was her triggered spark, for an honorable death, striking a blow for the empire, and in seconds...

She watched him watching her, steady, keen, with some modicum of grace. Had he seen this before, she wondered, and dealt with these dangers, and lived?

He must have. No rebellion-leader went without assassination attempts. Hers would be one of many, although unprecedented in scope...

Could his confidence be merited? Somehow, could he shielded even from the conflagration she could so easily release?

And, looking at him. This army he'd made.

Would his death, the death of this base, one component in a foundation, make a difference?

Had he set in motion a destiny which slouched on, inescapable?

Was the fall now spinning freely?

Had... had the _idea_ grown larger than the _man_?

11/4/07.

A gift for a dear friend. She requested Dib and Tenn, with the prompt Aerial Wanderlust.


	32. Spade

**://050. Spade.**

She doesn't much like them, but Bitters knows her children pretty well and she can call all their futures at a distance of twenty years or more. Not that she treats them different either way; the genius, the sociopath, the artist, all go through the same meat-grinder. She can pinpoint a weakness within an hour, a psychosis in minutes or less – at least if she can get a child alone.

So she can see that Membrane's boy is a hoper, an optimist in his bones even if his brain knows better; that he's an aspiring hero and an expiring dreamer. Maybe if he figures out that rejection isn't the worst thing the world can throw at him he'll do all right. Not that she's being hopeful – certainly not, at this juncture.

And Zim, well. He's not the only strange little thing she's seen in all her long years teaching about what life is really like. Bitters' class is a surprisingly busy place. As an Irken, he doesn't much break the mold, and even if he tries he won't be able to break her system either. Irkens are slaves to the machine, after all, and Zim might be a defective but he hasn't got the gumption to defy her.

All in all, this year with the kids isn't much different than the last, and won't be much different from the next. The aforementioned two might drive each other to greatness, but more likely they'll kill each other first, and Bitters is pretty much all right with that.

She's a little interested, though, in seeing what she make of Dib's haughty little sister.

10/23/07

From the saying, to call a spade a spade.


	33. School ::ZATR hints?::

**://088. School.**

He sees her again, many years on; he looks the same and she does too. But then again, that's no surprise. Creatures like them don't grow. They only change.

At him, she smirks, looking cheerful or something like it – he remembers, she looked so cheerful when she wanted to kill, too. Because he has a death wish more or less he joins her, starts snagging curly fries from her plate. She doesn't stop him.

"It's been a while, _Invader,_" and her tone makes the honored title a slur. "Crushed any planets lately?"

He bites his tongue hard. "I didn't think you'd survived," he replies. "But parasites always do."

She laughs nastily. "Like humans – I hear some are still kicking, giving you trouble?"

"Not him." That's important, an essential division. Not him. Not the first one. That much of a success, at least.

"Of course not. He was the first to go, I'll bet." She narrows her grape medicine eyes. "Did he beg?"

He snorts. "Him? Of course not."

A smile twists her lipless mouth. It looks like a painful, angry face, and he wonders what makes her so raw, talking about that boy. That cursed boy - ! Who still, he can't forget.

"You look different," she tells him. "Did you learn a thing or two, down there?"

More things than two, but he can't tell her that. The specter of Dib looks at him flatly, and then away.

"School of hard knocks, that place was," she says. "Tough little monsters there, and he was the toughest of all. Yes?"

"Not really."

The toughest monster of all was sitting here.

The smile changes, becomes less like a blade and more fleeting, fragile, a little more human. Tak must be defective too; such a brief exposure couldn't have damaged her so, otherwise.

"I did pick up some things," he concedes, and it's a big admission – not what they're supposed to do on a mission. But it is the truth, and the truth has become more important somehow. At the edge of his vision, Dib folds his pale hands and is now the one who looks away.

Tak looks at him, and for the first time in a long while, Zim feels like he's been seen.

"Show me," she says.

"All right," he doesn't say, but when she gets up and leaves he follows.

10/19/07


	34. Independence

**://099. Writer's Choice: Fortune.**

**Alternately, Approaching Escape Velocity.**

I dreamed about my mother last night.

I'm not sure there was any particular reason for that. It's not like she was murdered, and it was a visitation from her spirit, or anything. She's not even dead. After she left my dad for being a callous asshole she moved to New York, and last I heard of her she's working at a decent lab and has a new boyfriend, and is 100 not interested in dealing with her spawn any more. So I guess it was me talking to myself, except I'm not sure what I was trying to say.

"Dib," my dream-mother said, soft like she never was in life, "You need to get out of here, honey," More weirdness, she never called me by pet names; and I was trying to ask her what the hell made her start and mumbling but she just kept talking over me. "You need to get out of here, honey," she said. "You need to get out." She reached out her hand and put it gently on my forehead. "You have everything you need in here. You have everything, honey." She took her hand away and opened my hands, and pressed something cool and metal into them. It was a key, a little golden old-style key. "You have everything you need, honey." And then I woke up.

I wasn't holding anything. There was no lingering cool feeling on my forehead. Nothing abnormal. The least bizarre dream that I've had in a while, to be honest, which made it kind of weird in and of itself. But by then I was five minutes late getting up already and the race to get out of the door on time nearly put it out of my head. Maybe it would've been better disappeared, something so frivolous and small. But by the time I was sitting in class it had caught me again and I couldn't stop thinking about it, wondering what it meant.

It worried at me all day, boiling around in my brain through English and calculus and chemistry. Things do that, worry me, stick with me, and I could feel that this was one those stupid niggling little things that was bound to stick. We had a lab in chem and I would probably have dissolved my apron if Zim hadn't shoved me away from the chemicals. He looked at me kind of funny and snapped "what's gotten INTO you, stinkbeast!" It would have been nice to have had a sarcastic retort to that but I couldn't think of anything and just turned away from him.

I think that made him kind of worried. It was strange, how things had shifted a little between us as the years went on; still enemies but we were the only ones who really _understood_ each other, we were _equals_. He trusted me in a way, trusted me to tell him things and to be behind him when he needed someone smart and sane to back him up. I trusted him too, in a funny way. With my life, the only thing he never tried to use against me, but not with anything less important.

That was probably why he followed me into the library at lunch, and sat at the table across from me while I stared blankly at the wood grain and traced the patterns with my fingers. He was, in his own pushy extremely-bad-at-it alien way, trying to make sure I was okay. I had to appreciate the effort. Painful as it was.

"I had a dream last night," I told him finally, after five minutes of enduring his stare. He tapped his claws together impatiently and waited for me to elaborate. I wondered what I could possibly tell him that wouldn't sound insane.

"My mom was in it," I managed. "It was weird. She just.. told me I had to get out, and that I had everything I needed. She gave me a key."

"Do you have it with you?"

"It was a dream, moron, of course I don't!" I snapped, and he threw up his hands and hissed at me.

"Do not shout at Zim! Do not shout at Zim while he analyzes your crazy brain-rambles! ...You haven't been drinking sour milk before bed again, have you?" he asked.

I glared at him irritably. "No! It's just... bugging me, is all." What else was there to say?

He waited for a couple more minutes. I looked over his shoulder at the library behind him. Flickering lights, dingy carpet, the smell of books. Faded posters. It was old and unpleasant mostly, but it was familiar. _You've got to get out of here, honey_. I thought maybe I could see what she meant: the risk of letting myself settle in here, like a bug that builds a shell around itself and never leaves it. _You have everything you need..._

"Are you going to college, Zim?" I asked him, changing the subject with all the grace and subtlety of a blue whale trying to write daintily in cursive. He looked at me a little funny.

"I don't know. Hey- don't try to change the subject!"

"I'm not," I said. "Really." He didn't look convinced. "I'm serious!"

"'Kay, sure." He said. "You are, aren't you? Didn't you apply to... that one place?"

"Yeah," I replied softly. I had applied, to a place that was as far away as I could politely get. The Membrane son, reluctant heir of a scientific empire that spanned the world. I was a disappointment to the family and I knew it. "I'm going to study astronomy. See if I can get to the stars and find some other aliens that aren't such jerks." I grinned weakly.

Zim's so damn easy to distract, even now when he can usually tell what I'm trying to do. He yelled at me until we were thrown out and yelled at me until the bell rang and harangued me into class and only stopped when the teacher threatened him with detention. Ah, the wonders of history class; I sat in the back, put my head down on my arms and slept.

It felt like only a few seconds before Zim was shaking me furiously by the shoulder. I sat up fast enough to hit him in the face with the back of my head; he swore horribly in Irken and jerked away. I could catch a few human cusses in their too; after so long on earth he'd picked up the habit. The teacher was glaring at both of us, the room was empty; the day was over. Thank God for block schedules. I threw my backpack over my shoulder and scrambled out, Zim following me, bubbling with resentment like a pot about to boil. Oh, it's good to have friends.

At my locker he grabbed me by my shoulder, spun me around to face him. He looked like he was about to scream at me and I braced myself, getting ready to get mad and fight back. It didn't come as easy as it usually did. I wished I could talk to him again, put into words what was bothering me. It always broke up like this between us, when he remembered what he was and I remembered that I was supposed to be fighting him. The balance between us was just too delicate to stay for long, I guess. It made me sad. I would have liked to be able to talk to him, just for a day, without worrying what I said would be used against me.

Something on my face made him turn abruptly away. I wondered what it was. I almost followed him, to see if _he_ was okay now, but it was doubtful that he'd ever admit to being upset around me. Asking for help was okay, to a point, but confiding wasn't something he did- I guess Irkens didn't talk the way humans do sometimes.

It felt funny to walk home without someone following me. It felt funny to just go home in the first place, without any plans to leave again and infiltrate his base. Gaz had skipped school today to finish a new video game so there was no company on the street. It felt good to be alone, in a way; it let me hear the soft echoes of my mother's voice.

The mail was sitting at the front of the walk, and I picked it up before going in the house. Dad still hadn't keyed the electric fence to let the poor mail man in- it must really suck to have that guy's job, when you think about the frequency of high-voltage electric fences and vicious, slavering guard dogs on our street. I flipped through the envelopes slowly at the door. There was nothing interesting- bills, bills, an invitation to a scientific convention for Dad, a gamer's magazine for Gaz. It was getting to the time of year when colleges sent out their responses, wasn't it? I wondered if I was going to get one. They probably wouldn't turn down Dib, son of the famous Professor Membrane, though, right? Right?

The thought made me sneer. I would rather be rejected than be accepted just because I was his son. I guess there's no way to get away from your name, though...

I stomped into the house and pitched the pile onto the kitchen table; envelopes slid across it and a few spilled onto the floor. I left them and went to ditch my pack in my room. My computer was already on, showing a feed from a camera planted in Zim's kitchen. GIR was stuffing himself with waffles at the table; nothing significant. I didn't want to look at it; I didn't feel like spying on Zim today, when in his own way he'd tried to help me. I wondered if he ever got homesick too. He obviously hated earth. I wondered if it was possible to be homesick even if you were in your home. It kind of felt that way today.

Now I could hear Gaz moving around downstairs now, opening the fridge and getting food out. There was a scuffing noise and then she yelled up at me: "Hey DIB! There's something on the floor for you!"

I had a bad feeling about that opening already. "What is it?" I shouted back warily.

"Come look at it yourself," she snapped back sulkily. "Looks like it's from the University."

The University. The University. It could just be a nasty joke; she knew I was waiting for the letter. It could be true too. I could have missed it; I was flipping through those letters pretty fast. It was worth trying at least, wasn't it...?

She flicked the package to me, halfway up the stairs; I caught it between thumb and forefinger and looked at her. My sister had gotten pudgier over the years, all that pizza and junk food catching up to her. She still had eyes like a cat though, predatory and knowing. She stared silently back at me. _You've got to get out of here_; I heard my mom's voice again and felt chills swish across my skin.

It was hard to open it, even by myself in my room. The big brown envelope was heavy with papers and had blotchy, dark marks from my sweating palms. Schrödinger's envelope: if it's not open, they haven't rejected or accepted you yet. It might go either way. No way to influence the results; or at least, I had done everything I could before I sent out the essays and resume. From there it was out of my hands.

I dug a blunt fingernail under the flap and pulled it open. I could feel my heart jamming up against my ribcage with nervousness. Oh I wanted this. Oh please, please, please God, just this once. Give me what I want. Give me what I _need_. I need to get out of here. I need to go here, I need to get close to the stars.

The thing on top was a letter. I turned it over and over in my hands, half-afraid to look. I wanted to get in; in a way I expected to. I am a budding genius. I am a genius _already_. How can you possibly turn me away? But, at the same time, how could you not? It was what the world always did. It was just my fate. To be a loser when I was so close to making what I'd dreamed a reality.

…

_Dear Dib_:

_We are pleased to notify you that you have been accepted to the Oregon Technological Institute. Your excellent essays, superb SAT scores, and high class ranking have demonstrated that you are just the sort of student we need to keep up our high standard of academic achievement. What you have done with these things is not small; years of challenge, mental expansion, and growth lie ahead of you. Your adventure is just beginning!_

_My congratulations,_

_Spoony Instub_

_Dean of Admissions_

To some people, it would seem so small.

Lots of people go to college; plenty of people make it in what they want to do. Lots of people become successful. But this is _different_; this is _me_, this is a battle I've been fighting for seventeen-and-a-half years. The right to break away, to become more than just scion and peon to Membrane Industries. It's been an uphill battle every step but I think it could be worth it.

The fight isn't over, although I wish it could be. There's still Dad to get through; he'll want me to follow him. There's still the pressure of the rest of the year, and the other people around me. But I don't think in the end I'll be without allies. Zim will follow me, I'm sure of it; he won't stay here, to grow crusted into the town, to grow crushed and jaded. I feel like I could sing, or cry; or just step into the stars.

I feel like calling someone.

_You need to get out of here, honey._..

Maybe my mom. Or maybe Zim.

_You have everything you need._

END

_June 1, 2005_

_Retooled a bit November 28, 2007._

_A request for Dibsthe1, who asked for something good to happen to Dib. It's kind of predictable, I guess, but it makes me a little happy to read it and see something unequivocally good happening to the poor kid in one of my stories._


	35. Writer's Choice: In Women's Clothing

The thing about Gaz is she thinks she is so tough, because she can spit and snarl at the little world she paddles through and escape unscathed. She thinks that at sixteen she has grown up. Tak knows only a little about humans but she still knows better than this and she itches to break the delusion.

Gaz wears heavy boots with heels that could break heads. She stomps around and imagines crushing cities. She was meant to be born in another time, as another gender; rampaging with the Huns, with the Spartans, making conquests. Tak sniffs around the edges of Gaz's life, saying hello to Dib, eating lunch at their table. Dib is suspicious but friendly; he likes her, and he is very lonely, but his planet is always on his mind. Gaz's shoulders slouch mountainous. She ignores the world in favor of her Gameslave. When Dib wanders away, Tak leans over. Waits for the human girl's attention. "Play a game with me," she whispers, grinning vilely.

The three of them walk home together. Gaz headed to the Membrane house accompanied by Dib who is going to split off towards Zim's house in a few minutes, both of them followed by Tak who is simply bored and has nothing that comes to mind as better to do.

Tak likes Dib, in a way - she takes pride in him. His private war with Zim has honed and improved him. He balances very well in a highly dangerous playing field: between two Irkens who are enemies themselves. A precarious spot indeed.

Gaz is just interesting: a child who thinks she is an adult. A girl playing at being grown. Tak looks forward to the day when Gaz fetches up headlong against life and finds that it is tougher than she thinks.

_7/18/06_

_Modified a tad 1/11/06._

_Originally written for the "in women's clothing" challenge at the livejournal community illpronebelly. The community kind of died, the contest was never judged, I can't sleep and it's two thirty in the morning, so here it is._


	36. Months

**://009. Months.**

Eighteen years old made the finish line, with twelve months marking time between. That seemed so far, with three hundred sixty-five small eternities of embryonic boredom and coalescing opportunity in between... Dib's not sure what he'll do then, but damn, it had better be killer. With all this time to prepare.

Summer, fall, winter, the whole time counting down. In mid-October Dib stood on the roof of his house and yelled at the sky, "Fuck you!"

That boy doesn't know who he's yelling at, but the challenge stands: fuck you!

Twelve months left, but he's already had enough.

10/28/07.

_Lalala I don't like this one so you get it in a bundle with some others._


	37. Middles

**://002. Middles.**

The sex that night was lukewarm, routine; the sex he'd grown out of during college, like moving past eating exclusively cold pizza for breakfast. It was better to have it hot and fast and good, after all, than to settle for second best: but wasn't that what he found himself taking lately, second best? From the labs, from himself.

"Something wrong, Mem?" she said lazily, calloused hands folded neatly across her belly; and the shadows around where her legs met her body would've been intriguing if he hadn't been turned away, thinking too hard to pay attention. She wasn't offended, that was the way it was between them, the best intimacy arising when they were both swept along and inspired by their work.

"I don't know," he admitted moodily, broad pale shoulders tensing slightly under the cool ocher of her gaze. She thought he truly had excellent skin; surprisingly speckled with moles along his left shoulder blade, and she used to want to draw lines and connect them into some body-constellation to remember.

"No really," she said, "I can tell you're bothered about something, come on. We've worked together long enough."

Was he fidgeting? How out of character, for the hyper-focused hyper-prodigy to fidget. She hadn't seen this before, and watched with interest as he battled out some inner conflict. She hadn't been aware he ever suffered from inner conflict either. No crises of conscience for this scientist...

"Well," he admitted, at last. "The lab's been progressing slowly lately, you see?"

"You've been uninspired."

"Yes," he said, although it wasn't a question. "I don't know. I've been looking for a new project for a long time. Something to hold my interest. But there isn't much. Maybe.."

"Maybe?"

"I'm thirty-five," he said. "What if you can lose the spark? Early in life? What if I have?"

She rolled up her shoulders and laughed a little, a hoarse little wheeze of a laugh. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Plenty of scientists go on working until they die. Thirty-five? That's just an early mid-life crisis. Plenty of people have those and they have other means of fixing them."

He'd turned his head slightly, to better catch her words. "Oh?" he said, sounding abruptly dry, different from the pompous ass he sometimes came across as, in the lab. "What's your suggestion?"

She smiled. "Have you thought about children?"

10/12/07

_...ha ha._


	38. Purple

**://016. Purple.**

"He's really oblivious, you know," someone said, and Gretchen glanced up then nearly dropped her spork at meeting Gaz's level amber gaze.

"Beg pardon?" she said hastily, unwilling to give Dib's frightening younger sister any excuse to maul her. Gaz blinked once, placidly.

"Dib. He doesn't notice, you know. You're wasting your time."

Hurt, a little, although what could she reasonably have expected from the other girl? And a little melancholy, Gretchen glanced across the lunchroom. Dib was visible, locked in sneering conversation/confrontation with Zim as always, and Gretchen sighed. Then jumped, as Gaz sat down next to her and began rattling silverware around.

"You're much too quiet for him," Gaz said clinically, ripping open a ketchup packet and squirting it over her fries. Gretchen, very quietly, gulped. "You need to get louder if you want _his_ attention. Melt a few faces off, that always works. But I wouldn't waste my time."

Buying time, Gretchen sipped hastily at her milk. This was entirely strange: most of the time people didn't pay much notice to her, except if she was in the way, and Gaz was the last person she'd ever expected to casually approach her during the cafeteria.

"Well..." the older girl muttered, finding her milk carton drained. Uncomfortably she crumpled it up, staring down at her pale, scarred hands, her chipped orange nail-polish. "I don't know. Dib's really nice, and -"

"Not really," Gaz interrupted blandly. "No one in my family is ever really nice."

She had her eyes open now, Gretchen saw; the color and the even, evaluating quality reminiscent of Dib in a calmer state.

"Well," Gretchen said weakly, "I think he kind of is. He's always working hard, at least..." She faded off. Gaz looked a little amused now.

"If you really want," she said. "Whatever. Why don't you come over Saturday? Maybe he'll be around then."

Gretchen wavered, finding it hard to swallow for a second. How forward, to show up at Dib's house, unannounced; and what were she and Gaz going to do anyway? She didn't know anything about Dib's little sister, except the peripheral characteristics that had to go into figuring Dib out. That seemed to imply Gaz was scary. It would really be best to refuse. She had school projects anyway...

"Sure," she heard herself say. "Maybe I will."

They had, Gretchen noticed, the same color hair.

10/13/07.


	39. Outsides

**://005. Outsides.**

"Why do you keep doing this?"

"Hmh?!" Zim looked up from the doom device he was messing around with, quirking one eye in mild surprise at the other Invader who stood beside him. Skoodge was a short Irken, shorter even than Zim, although he did decently in training. He kept to himself. Zim hadn't talked with him before.

"Why do you stay here?" Skoodge repeated, his dull red gaze steady. He was one of the less flamboyantly emotional Irkens in the service, and unpopular because of it; during leave he tended to remain on his own working ahead in the Invader's manual or simply engaging in solitary pursuits. If he hadn't been on an Invader's track he might even have been deemed a defective and eliminated.

Mildly offended, Zim pushed his project aside and sat ramrod-straight at his work bench. "What kind of fool-question is that?!" he demanded. "The position of Invader is an exalted one! No branch of the Irken military does as much for the Empire as I will do once my training is complete."

The smaller Irken finally invited himself to sit. Steepling his pudgy hands in front of his face, he gave Zim a cool, evaluating glance across the table. "No, you don't have to do this," he said. "You're not large..."

Zim bristled at the implication.

"...but you're tall enough to leave this training and be successful at something else. As an Invader, you'll be sent away from the Empire, disconnected from any chance for advancement in the capital planets, and a misfit if you eventually try to return to the fold..."

"I'm short," Zim bit out harshly. Not a truth he liked to acknowledge, but a truth nonetheless.

"I'm shorter," Skoodge pointed out. "I have to do this for any chance at glory. You're just doing this because..."

"I don't have to listen to the babble of idiots," Zim sneered, beginning to bundle his project into his drawer. He stood up and made an about-face to the door, but he could still hear Skoodge speaking behind him.

"You're just doing this because you like being a reject."

* * *

"Why are you doing this?"

Dib jumped, looked up. Zim stood above him, boot-toes primly lined up, glaring down at the human in the bushes.

"Huh?" he replied, feeling his face heat up with a blush. He thought he'd been pretty well concealed too, but if the Invader had already detected him there was really no point in staying down... especially because he might have to run.

Zim stepped back as Dib got to his feet, pinning the human with an unfriendly stare as Dib pulled twigs out of his hair and brushed away the dead leaves which clung to his jacket. Finally the two of them locked gazes, Dib wondering if he'd need to make a break for it, Zim inscrutable.

"Why do you keep doing this?" the Invader repeated, large eyes narrow. He'd seemed to be in a strange mood for the past week or so, and in the interest of keeping the planet safe Dib thought he should step up security. He was regretting that decision now; Zim seemed to be in a dangerous mood, and Dib was only lightly armed. Still, it might be a good chance to get some information.

Dib stepped back and slipped his hands into his pockets. Zim sank immediately into an attack crouch, but didn't move otherwise; they were in public, and Dib thought they'd both have enough sense to avoid a totally insane confrontation in front of bystanders.

"What kind of question is that?!" he demanded. "You're attacking my planet and threatening to enslave everyone! What else am I supposed to do, huh?"

Zim didn't change his fighting posture. "No, you don't _have_to do this, human," he said. "You're weird and weird looking..."

Dib bristled. "Hey, leave my appearance out of this, thanks."

"...but you could still find a place with your fellow humans, if you tried. If you wanted to bother. You go things alone because you_ want_ to."

"In case you hadn't noticed, everyone thinks I'm insane," Dib snapped. Not a truth he particularly enjoyed being aware of, but a truth nonetheless.

"They think I'm crazier," Zim said clinically. "I'm just better at talking to your own race than you are."

"Are you done?" Dib snapped irritably. He backed further away, wishing that the conversation had never started. Branches snapped under his feet. "You have no idea what it takes to interact with another human in a way that... that doesn't involve melting faces off or stealing their organs! Why are you trying to talk to me about being popular, of all things? Get out, Zim."

When he reached the curb he turned around and started walking fast, but he could still hear Zim's high voice. "You're not doing this because you can't do anything else," the Irken repeated. "You're doing this because you like being a reject."

10/23/07


	40. Air

**://55. Air**

He puts his bony hands around Dib's throat, and squeezes until the boy's easy breaths turn raw. He's going to do it this time, see it through 'til the end.

"Is it worth it?" Zim whispers to him. "Now that you know?"

Dib's narrow fingers flex on Zim's wrists. A gurgle, a click, they are all the response that emerges from Dib's swollen mouth, but Zim can hear him: "_Yes_."

Zim adds a little pressure, pushing the boy, but slow, slow. "Would you do it again?" he growls. Dib's eyelids flutter. He cannot answer, now.

The child fights unconsciousness. It must be instinct, self-preservation, what with Zim choking the life out of him. Dib's lips are pale. Blood pools in his sclera. He surges up wantingly against Zim again and again, demanding breath, muscles cording, the body dying hungry.

"What you need, it's right here," Zim says, merciless. "Take it if you can, human." You little mud monster with aspirations of greatness. I want to see you freeze, your face blue and cold; and throw your body, puppet that it is, into a coffin of snow.

Dib doesn't need to talk. Zim knows the answers he'll give, anyway.


	41. Years

**://010. Years.**

Someone was there, he knew it – but he couldn't see, and thrashed, panicking, until strong steady hands gentled him. Those were youthful hands, he thought, brisk in their movements, pummeling relaxation into his spasming muscle. And possibly familiar, although, those hands... the tone had been different then.

He managed to open his eyes finally. Color was slack, faded, and darkness cloaked the edges of his vision, but he could see his guest. Probably unannounced, perched sullenly in the chair next to the bed, withdrawn now and looking away, embarrassed, after that one initial favor of hard touch.

"Hello," he said, though he had to pull in a few hard breaths before he could quite manage it. Still, there was something about this other... it seemed he could feel some of youth's velocity flowing back into his limbs, like sap warming up in a tree, after a long winter. It had been a long time though.

"Hello," returned the other, voice harsh – although did that voice know any other way to be? He couldn't remember when this creature... no, this person... had ever not been harsh. The kindness, if there was any kindness, and not just projection, was inside.

"I thought you might have forgotten me," his guest says, and how rude, he'd almost forgotten the other, lost in recalling the things that once were.

"I'm sorry," he says. "My mind wanders a little now. I apologize. Should I threaten to dissect you, or try to pull your insides out?"

The joke, poor as it was, was not taken well... not that the recipient could be blamed. He had never taken well to being the butt of other's humor. There was one thing that had not changed. "I'm sorry," he said again. "Can I help you?"

His guest's voice sounded raw now. "Don't say these things!" he said, very sharply. "That... this... was never you. This is not you!"

Was there ever really a response to a statement like that? He moved his hands weakly, wishing he could reach out, that he dared, that he knew how. But there are some distances that were too big still... after so many years... and some temperatures so cold that a human dared not touch them. "All right," he said, instead. Maybe the other wanted an argument but he'd have to go somewhere else for that, he didn't have the energy for that right now, it would take... too much... although it didn't matter. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"I thought so," the visitor said, bitterly. "Before. But maybe I was wrong... shall I go?"

"Oh, you're not wasting my time," he replied. "I have plenty of it. I'm not busy. Don't go running away now, you, you..." and insults failed him.

"Running away!" the other said, laughing bitterly. "I do not run. Although..."

"That was what it was," he agreed, unafraid. Let the guest hurt him now, there was precious little left to hurt: and if this was the end, maybe it was time to turn up all the old earth, and watch the worms trying to thrash back underground.

"Perhaps," the guest agreed, maybe humoring him – he wouldn't, couldn't make himself think that he'd had an affect on this one, changed him... it would be too painful, to take up hope again, after giving it up for so long. Maybe hope was like a muscle that atrophied and had to be built up again. It seemed like he could feel it kindling, in some dust-furred corner of his mind. Maybe.

How painful. How fitting. At the last.

"Perhaps running was what it was," his guest says. Maybe not humoring him... "At any rate..."

"Oh? Is there something?"

"Quiet, mammal," the other snapped. "I'm getting to it!"

"Of course," he says, nearly managing wryness. Another novelty: he hasn't managed wryness, sarcasm, in so long! This might be a step back in the direction of actual humor! Wondrous! "Take your time."

"You little beast," the guest murmurs, cursing, endearing. "You little worm. Have you changed?"

"I think you have." He laughs, coughs. Maybe that's why he hasn't laughed in so long: because it hurts a little now, to do it. "I don't think I ever did."

"No," the other murmurs, voice low and bitter and sweet, like poison in honey. Like the devil wheedling a man's soul, and how accurate an image. "No, you did. It's what you do. What your kind does. What I... found. Perhaps."

For a moment, each of them is silent.

"Perhaps," he agrees, at last. Not hopeful or pessimistic but simply acknowledging, with the air of someone who expects to discuss an issue further at a later date. "At any rate, are you here for a while? Or are you running off again?"

"Here, I suppose," his guest says, back to sounding chilly again. "Not for too long."

"Well, in the meantime," he says encouragingly. "Why don't you make yourself useful. For once."

He moves one knobbly hand hopefully, in the direction he has been talking too; and in a moment there is the slight, piercing pressure of a lean hand on his. Now stay awhile, he wishes. Stay.

Zim sat, watching Dib, until the man's breathing gentled and slowed. It has been a long, long time.

10/12/07

_I don't know._


	42. Who?

**://076. Who?**

They took him to visit her, once. The trip gave him screaming nightmares for months afterwards: the blinding white corridors, crying seeping out of the walls. The thick miasma of terror that hovered around the place and the doctors who spoke staccato-fast, tangling him up in a gummy fog and icing down his skin with sweat.

He spoke with a crying woman there, who wore a pale jacket and had bright red marks ringing her wrists. Her mouth was twisted like a horrid wound but her gaze was hot, focused, light beaming through a magnifying glass. "My boy," she said, hollow. "My boy, my boy."

He shivered. His father stood up behind him.

The pale men told his father: _No improvement. She hasn't come out from the war. From what they did to her in the war._

_Maybe the boy shouldn't here?_

In the car going home, he had to ask. Asking was what he did. "Who... who was the lady, daddy?" he whispered, huddled in his colored clothes, but inside bleached and chilled and stretched out to dry. "Who was she?"

A moment of silence, rolling. And: "That was your mother, son."

10/14/07

_Ahaha suuuuuuck._

_Explanation: in the episode Parent-Teacher Night, Zim yells that his father was messed up in the war. I took it was too seriously and thought WOAH, what if there really WAS a war that he was referring too? Wouldn't that be cool? I had some other, better ideas, but here's the shortfic that came out._


	43. Days

**://007. Days.**

_Monday's child is fair of face._

Zita is often told that she is _such _a pretty girl. Sure, she knows that she is. She's worked hard for that, to make her face the first thing people look at, because she thinks that's all she has to rely on. Gretchen is ugly but nice, Dib is crazy, but smart. Torque is strong, but dumb.

Zita is pretty, but empty. That's what she hangs on to.

_  
Tuesday's child is full of grace._

Gretchen is not going to grow up a remarkable child. She's average. Not an artist, a scientist, a philosopher, a crusader. Once her braces come off she'll be easy on the eyes but not a stunner. She comforts herself with the idea that someone needs to stand behind the velvet rope and clap while those people walk by, right? That even works sometimes.

She doesn't see, how she's growing up still, gentle, strong; how when she's an adult she'll be someone's place of refuge, of peace.

_  
Wednesday's child is full of woe._

Dib will eventually need something like that, someone who is still and even where he's torn-up and jagged. A kid doesn't grow up as desperate as he is and not end up buckled strangely in some part of his mind. He has perspective, though. Dib knows that anger isn't unique to him. Nor is pain. All the same he feels it keenly.

Someday, either someone will rescue him from his own mind (hard to climb out of a pit that slippery by yourself), or he'll turn out to the dark, to the stars, and follow his nose out there, in the footsteps of a face and a laugh he half-remembers and that he forgot because he wanted to. Either way might eventually stave off pain.

_  
Thursday's child has far to go._

Tak's worked back-breaking hard all of her life, and been flung back to the bottom of the ladder each time. It's bad luck, it's fate, it's one obnoxious Irken and his irksome robot who cause it – who knows? She could blame everyone, she could blame anyone. Instead she grits her teeth and starts striving again, every time. It's hard work and it's a long way, but victory would be _so_ worth it.

Tak's a genius, and Tak's a fool, because she thinks she can beat out the universe on her own. But she's a product of her race, which is full of geniuses and fools. She won't see the impossibility on her own, but she will keep trying, and that might bring her grace, someday.

_  
Friday's child is loving and giving._

What he gives is disaster, and affection with it. To his master, to the Dib-human, to the lady Irken he didn't know; but he gives it freely, and loves giving it. He's a powerfully simple creature. Like the tide, like sunlight. He doesn't know it, so he can be happy anyway.

_Saturday's child works hard for his living._

Zim, Zim, Zim, Invader Zim, Frycook Zim, Smeet Zim, Irken Zim – just Zim. He dreams so big, he desires so much, he starts at the lowest rung and hauls his way bodily upwards. Everything in the world's against him. His own race, his servant, his own best friendenemy.

Every day is an uphill battle, and he has to work hard for his victories, because Zim's an idiot – he's not perceptive. He works against the world. He doesn't know how to make it work for him.

Someday the current might pick him up off his feet, and take him with it, and there'll be no choice except to learn to live with life on its own terms – not even the mightiest of conquerors can deny nature. He's going to hate it. It will be his lucky day.

_  
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day  
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay. _

(This is the real world. There is no such child.)

3/2/08.


	44. Brown ::DibGretchen::

**://017. Brown.**

Because she was that kind of girl, and in love besides, Gretchen bought chocolates on a whim one day – dark-dark chocolate, sixty percent cocoa, because Dib had no taste for too-sweet sweets and the cashier said that they were the highest quality they had.

"Life is like a box of chocolates" was embossed in gold foil on the box, which was dark, very subtle, very nice – frolicking big-eyed kittens or schmoopy flowers not included. Dib smiled when she showed him the box at lunch, in his kind of distracted blank-affectionate oh-you're-there kind of way, and they sat on the stairs to each pick out their first-choice candy. Gretchen took something nearly black with tiny speckles of white on top, Dib something square striped alternately with dark and light brown.

The candy was shockingly, stunningly bitter. Gretchen nearly choked on it. She basically swallowed the chocolate whole and then gasped as it nearly blocked her windpipe. Dib made a noise like he was stifling a very inappropriate laugh.

"I-I'm sorry," she gasped. "Wow! Those are foul. I didn't expect that."

"Pure chocolate," Dib said, still kind of laughing. "It's harsh. Whoever said life is like a box of chocolates, they were right. At least if they were talking about real chocolates. Bitter!"

Smirking, he grabbed a whole handful of the darkest-looking sweets, and ate them all down.

3/2/08


	45. Lunch

**://057. Lunch.**

Outside, the street teemed with furtive business. Intergalactic toughs and patsies met and menaced each other on their way to menial jobs or whatever private matter concerned them. Sizz-Lorr narrowed his deep-set eyes at the crowd and flipped the sign on his door to "closed".

Some customers just couldn't take a hint, he thought, lumbering across to one of his booths and seating himself on the cracked plastic with a sigh. He laced his thick fingers together and stared up at the small, flickering screen mounted the upper corner of the dining area. The image was small but crisp. He hadn't spared expenses on outfitting his cover. Currently, it pictured a small Irken gesticulating madly. He was clearly screaming, and the tinny whisper of the crowd's roar rushed from the speakers and filled the room.

Sizz-Lorr relayed a command through his pak, and the volume increased. Zim leapt onto his podium and whipped his fists through the air, howling fit to burst, and the clamor of the audience eclipsed Zim's, and the scrolling line of text at the screen bottom could barely keep up with the ranting...

The pressure of his clasped hands was nearing painful.

When the door chimed, it took him a long moment to make the connection between door and customer. Jerkily he sat up straight, shooting his most hostile glare at the intruder, and wondering why the lock had failed.

The intruder glared sharply back. Small, it was, and fierce; crested with purple the same shade of his eyes.

"We are closed," he rumbled, half-rising. "Are you stupid?"

He was much larger than the skinny creature accosting him, and iron-hard muscles tensed as he got ready to throw it out, or have a real throw-down, at least.

"Shut up," it said to him. "You're watching the broadcast. It's quiet in here. Just shut up and let me watch."

He took a large step forward, and then hesitated. The lack of fear in that small body put him off attacking. The alien held its ground, and after a long moment Sizz-Lorr grunted disdainfully and backed away. He didn't want a fuss, and a fight would distract him from watching the broadcast, anyway.

He turned, bristling. If the alien had said anything he would have thrown it out, but the booth behind him only creaked as it seated itself. In silence they both observed the screen, Sizz-Lorr plagued with a prickling awareness of the intruder unsettling him.

Once Zim's speech was done, he switched off the screen with another pak-command. His lip curled with disgust, and he knew that Schloogorgh's would stay closed for the rest of the day. Work might have diffused his fury but that would have been too easy. He wanted to nurse his wrath, savor it.

Without turning, he said, "So what's your story?"

The alien's attention was almost a tangible pressure when directed towards him. After a moment of deliberation, it said, "You know Dib?"

"Of course." He sneered. Who wouldn't know Dib, the pariah? The upstart? The alien with big ideas?

In all honesty, though, Sizz-Lorr would follow even an upstart primitive against the self-styled self-proclaimed "Allmighty Smallest" of the Irken Empire.

Seat-covers squeaked when the creature behind him shifted. "My brother," it said dryly, and Sizz-Lorr's antennae stirred without him thinking. A telling admission, sensitive information to be revealed so carelessly. "If you know him, you know his history with Zim and the Tallest, and that now he and Zim are fighting."

He'd heard more, of course, about how strongly Dib held his followers, how the spark-flash leader of the rebellion had retreated ("regrouped") to the edge of claimed space, where Vortian scientists did their best for him.

Even a defunct special ops officer could find out that much.

"Yes, your brother," he said coldly. "What are you doing untethered from your littermate? I did not know that humans had so many sibs that they could abandon each other at will." He searched his mind for a name, and found one: Gaz, female sibling to the Dib. Gaz, a female, a sister.

Delicately, Gaz snorted at him. "If my brother dies, I'll succeed him," she said boredly. "So this one time..."

Sizz-Lorr flexed his thick fingers on the table. "And if you die out here?" he asked, his mind perfectly blank. From behind, a stuttering arid laugh.

"There are other lieutenants."

Tak, he knew. Tenn. Others swayed by the rebellion,its promise of personal advancement, the surplus of non-Irken fighters not once deterring the disloyal followers of the Empire.

He was a former special forces officer. The rebels he knew wouldn't be so lax with the safety of one of their leader's precious persons.

He didn't glance over his shoulder, but queried the restaurant's managing AI, for the security cameras. They returned a snapshot to him: her, reclining. It took spooch, walking in and making an approach like this. He would admit that.

He wasn't aware of making any decision until he spoke. "I have little power left," he said, and had to stop for a moment and grit his teeth at the admission. Going the way of all those other traitors... "That Zim... he did not forget me, once in power, and..."

"We know that," she said; the feed showed her flicking her fingers carelessly, as if shaking off moisture. "There are other places for a smart Irken. Opportunities. We are a meritocracy."

Opportunities, for someone with a vendetta against Zim. Opportunities, for someone who knew the old channels, and who else might have rebel sympathies. Myriad opportunities.

He turned around slowly in his seat, and glared at her. Gaz's expression didn't change, and even though she was an alien, unfamiliar, he thought he could read triumph in her posture.

"O-kay, subIrken," he said. "I will see what you have to say to me."

A promise, he couldn't manage – not yet. A meal, he could do.

3/2/08.

_You wouldn't believe how long I've worked on this. And it's so short and... ah. Well. In the same universe as the Aerial Wanderlust drabble, if you want._

_There are so many interesting character interaction ideas for this series that nobody ever writes._

_Sizz-Lorr as special ops: well, he was given Zim to keep track of. I don't think our favorite Invader would really have been trusted to a regular Irken, right? It's an entertaining idea._


	46. Diamond

Warning: this is **not **in my mind a particularly admirable vision of Dib, or what he might become; but it interested me and I decided to write about it. I don't agree with a lot of what he says here.

Also, publishes this drabble means that I have only thirty-six left to write. Thirty-six! Out of one hundred! Then this will be over and I'm never signing up for anything like this ever again!

**://048. Diamond.**

"_He who place him head above him heart – he diamond!"_

_-from (or at least paraphrased from) the book Thud by Terry Pratchett._

Hey, Zim.

Ouch – ouch, Jesus, you little shit! Get off or I'm having you put back in restraints! Shit!

...That's better. Yeah, keep your distance – I'm not down here for pleasantries either. Fact is, I have a deal to make.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Zim. You can yell all you want – I am seriously going to have you in restraints again if you keep pulling this crap! You can yell, and I can get you put away and leave you here, and you can enjoy another five years in this cell without seeing daylight, and I can – I can still get everything I want! Because this isn't out of the goodness of my heart that I'm asking you!

You just make things easier, is all.

That's right. Finally.

You know what, Zim? You're going to love this, because you know, when I was a kid, all those things you yelled, you were right. Well, not all of them. But yeah, yeah, you know, the world _stinks_. Earth's full of so many shitheads that unless you're as lucky as I am – yeah, I am lucky – nobody smart can climb high enough to make a difference.

You know Dad's dead now? Last week, actually. No, I don't expect you to be sorry. Go ahead and laugh but he's dead, and that's why I'm down here.

Because I'm the head of Membrane Industries now. The whole thing, the whole fucking enchilada, get it? The alternative energy research, the communications research, the medical research, all of it, and as of last week another department's official too. Yeah, my brainchild. It's called Explorations. Yeah, I named it – shut the hell up!

Okay. Okay.

Thing is now – ten years later, I know – I finally get what needs to be done, what needs to happen. The world _needs _me now, okay? More than they ever did when I was fighting you. They might not want me but they _need _me. Humanity is killing itself. Like an obese diabetic suffocating under his own fat. On this tiny planet... my God, Zim. Tak's ship, now that I've been out, now that I _know _what's really out there, now that I've _seen _it how much more is out there I know why you hated this planet. How could you give all that up?

Anyway... Anyway. All of them, they're never gonna understand what has to be done, what we have to _do _to make my race healthy again.

Did you know, years ago scientists decided that evolution had quit? The human race, it, we'd reached a threshold where we weren't evolving anymore. Natural selection was, um, defunct. People weren't mating for brains or inventiveness or desirable traits anymore. It was all about _love_, or _looks_, or _money_.

Yeah, I can tell that doesn't surprise you – shut up, shut up, shut up, I'm not done! Take a chill pill, space boy.

Anyway.

What I want to do is start natural selection again.

Don't look at me like I'm crazy. I _know_ how this can work. Our race, we were conquistadors once too. You would've been impressed – people were chewed up, spit out. Whole cultures, even! And oh, they hate it now, in the history books it's such a bad, bad thing. But it was good for us.

Earth's all staked out now. We, this nation, this _company –_ first, we start with chewing up things that are weaker. We make the planet ours. Natural selection. And then, you know where there's other people ready to be chewed up and spit out, Zim? You do. I know you do.

Space, Zim.

Our race, after earth's united – we'll be like _steel_, Zim. No one's gonna be ready for us. No one'll be able to stop us... Well, that's where you come in.

We need tech, Zim. We demand it. More tech, faster, because _I _know what we're gonna find out there, and yeah. Damn straight it's arrogance, but I do know. Better than anyone else. We need tech like yours. Irken tech, alien tech, good and solid to meet whatever's out there and hold up. I could make it myself but it'd be too slow, there's so much else to do, and – those leaders of yours? The ones who betrayed you, who let you stay down here and laughed and forgot about you? Think of them, you little sociopath. Think of their faces, when we show up with an army worth fearing behind us.

Madness, crazy, maybe, sure. But seriously, Zim. Is it madness, when it's possible? Is that crazy or visionary?

Sure, do some struggling with your race loyalty first, and then think of what they did to you. What they let happen to you. Of getting your own back.

Yeah, you'd be working with me. Your enemy. It must gall. Believe me, I know. But either way you're not getting out of my sight.

Yeah, you'd be hated by your whole buggy race. So what's new?

What's in it for you? Well.

Just imagine getting to see daylight again.

3/10/08.


	47. How? ::surprise pairing::

**/081. How?**

Theirs was a love strange and foreign to their station, unique in the annals of universal history and without hope for the future. She knew it even as she fell prey to her ravenous, traitorous emotions, that they were bound to fall. Loving him or – she could hardly call it love, to acknowledge her feeling 

sealed her fate which still, still she railed against.

She was the wise one. She knew her place in the universe and knew that for all her ambition here was where she would fall short. Defiance against the natural order of things was bound to failure, and that was the simple truth which even a fighter of her ferocity couldn't turn aside.

He was a fool – but what a bright, wild fool. He wouldn't change himself for anyone, couldn't, in fact. Madness was in his nature. A kinetic soul who swept others with him in the simple rhythms of his being, and irreversible, undeniable in the face of her black and regimented existence, he'd taken her up too.

Her future, which had once seemed so assured, was plunging into a tangle of confusion that she wasn't sure she could survive. And now that she'd tasted this newer, brighter life, she couldn't hope to return to her old state of being – all the sadder and more hopeless for her brief taste of all the lovely things the universe had to offer. There was no way out for her, or for him.

There would just be the memory of those fleeting, sweet days... and the knowledge of their ending.

It hung over her, that even as tragedies they would be unknown: the forgotten lovers, MiMi and GIR.

Even as Tak stared grimly out into the star field and stroked grasping, concerned hands over her SIR's metal casing, whispering of the glories which they would one day return to claim, MiMi would not be comforted.

3/17/08.

_Ahaha. Next drabble is back to pretentious seriousness, I promise._


	48. Earth

**/053. Earth.**

_(the burial-grounds)_

Disinterring old bones is hard, thirsty work, although – Dib isn't sure that what he's doing here, reclaiming remains that the green grass sea claimed, should really be allowed such a proper, technical term. Disinterring. It's not like these people were ever properly put to rest in the first place. Now bringing them back, it's raising up the clamor of old ghosts. His fellow volunteers are mostly much older than he, the professors as well. They lived through the terror of their government devouring thousands of its people, and they move the earth aside with fear and eagerness jockeying for first place in their minds.

There are still mass graves hidden on the pampas of Argentina. A thick pelt of grass covers them now, but they're there, and they're found.

The belongings of the dead mark them. Earrings, charms from bracelets, rolled in the long grass like lice in hair. Or the simple phenomenon like that observed in the arctic, where the earth squeezes and pushes the bones up towards the surface. Even the dinky finger bones surfacing from the earth like beluga whales pale against the dark, cold waters. Like birth: a tendency for things to come to light.

A gaucho spots a glint of metal in the grove he rides through every day. A stray child works a long bone free from his dog's mouth. Things are found. Secrets reveal themselves and people come to dig.

Grass sheared away, the ground is squared off, and volunteers trowel the earth away with care. They find ribs, skulls splintered where the bullets hit. The winglike sweep of a scapula appearing like an apparition through the dirt. Dib digs with them because he wants to get to know the race he worked so hard for, and find out himself whether he loves it or hates it.

There's not much to talk about, except when there's a thousand things to talk about. Just every so often he runs across a bone and follows that one to another, thinking, _who were you? _These people were tumbled together when they died. Keeping the bodies, the bones separate, so the skeletons are complete as can be, is trying business but it's what should be done. It's what they try to do.

He has a favorite amongst the professors. Her name is Isabel, she teaches history; she must be around sixty but she's very beautiful. At least she appears so to him. Perhaps it's the vibrant, nearly luminous quality that's so attractive, like her spirit's grown too big for her body.

"I was around ten when the government was taking people," she tells him, over coffee so black it's like drinking smoke. "My father was a university professor as well, and he spoke against the people in power. They took him on a spring morning. He would walk to his favorite café to grade papers. That day he did not come back and we knew what had happened."

Her eyes are dark, intense, the irises nearly black. They dominate her narrow face. They seem nearly to burn in their darkness, with a searing austere clarity. There are no tears glimmering in her eyes. Dib wants to look away, he wants to look through, and see what it must have been like, suddenly living with that empty hole in your life where once there was a father. He feels he could tip forwards, like Alice through the looking glass, and plunge into an older, sadder world. His childish rivalries and twenty-something angst seem so trivial next to this.

"Did you ever find out what happened to him?" he finally asks.

"Oh, Dib." She smiles at him, and those eyes are hidden behind half-fallen lids but he doesn't forget them. He can't. "We knew what had happened to him. It is only the details that are lost."

_Could this be your father,_ he wonders, brushing away dirt from the gaunt profile of a skull. _Is this him, finally, Professor Peron? Professor Is-a-bel? _

Time, and the DNA has decayed, but dental records might still show. Reverently he removes the remains, what he can find, from the soil's embrace.

Night, on the pampas, and the sunset is lovely. The grasses turn black and wave in the breeze, which is warm, like some unknown creature's exhalation. Under the trees there is absolute darkness and the volunteers retreat back to their jeeps to drive back to the small town they're based in. It's tiny and quiet, except for the bar, which is energetic. Isabel drives him back over the rutted makeshift road. "It's good to have you with us, Dib," she tells him. "We need you, people like you. We need the young so that the crimes that were done to my people are not forgotten. Please remember these stories, when you return to America. You're a bright boy, I know you will."

"Okay," he agrees, feeling young and complacent next to her. Her hands on the wheel are gaunt, with prominent knuckles, and the veins thick and blue. They aren't large hands and it seems stunning that they can be so capable, so strong, able to wipe away so many tears and carry so many lolling children. Uncomfortable, he rolls down the window just a sliver and moving air roars through the cab. The sunset glows like the last bit of a melon's rind, and the stars are just beginning to appear, like shy children.

"What do you think it means," he asks her, "that the Dirty War happened? I mean... What do you think it means, that things like this happen again and again? Every secret police force, ever regime there ever was." Everything he hasn't mentioned, all those places where people massacred each other over color or creed or territory or hunger or a reason not discernible from his privileged vantage point. Where does it come from, this desire people seem to have, to subjugate and kill each other? What does it come from, this racial death wish that I seem to see?"

"Do you know, Dib," Isabel shakes her head sadly, and her long hair shifts. "I've been studying history for forty years and I still can't tell you. It seems to happen again and again, doesn't it?"

"What do you think it would take to stop it?" he mutters. "The end of the world, huh?"

She sighs, and he thinks he's disappointed her. "Oh, Dib," she says. "You're so young and so angry. I was like you, once. But do you know, again and again, it seems like people become better then that – doesn't it? We reject it, and the people who started it lose power even if they don't come to justice. People get angry, and swear that these things will never happen again, and after a while they forget and then things do happen. But it's never been permanent, that I've seen."

"It still happens," he says. "So what's the point?"

"Ay, Dib. Twenty years, and you of all of us know that the world is pointless!" He can see her smiling, this fragile woman, more fragile than the paper she writes her historical treatises on. "You should have seen from this, the earth herself will show our secrets no matter how well we hide them. Over all the years of human progress – and I use the word loosely – there is nothing that makes you happy?"

No. Yes. He still doesn't know, so he doesn't answer – although. _Isabel, here in the dark with you, I am happy._

She drops him off at the apartment he's renting for the duration of the dig, and surprises him by getting out of the car too. She comes around and gives him a gentle, loose hug, and he surprises himself by letting her and by hugging back. She smells like old lady and feels like a bird underneath his hands.

"Your father would not be very happy with me," she says, muffled into his chest, "if he knew that I promised to look after you and then let you get into this state."

"I won't tell if you won't."

"Dib." She pulls swiftly back. "That's because you and your father don't talk. Now, you must forgive an abuela her presumptions, but you should call each other. And you should go out and get a drink and dance tango with a girl tonight. I remember feeling angry and alone when I was young too – you think I didn't feel that? You must not, you must promise not to let it eat you up."

He has to pause a long moment before replying. Isabel Peron doesn't move, and he thinks if he needed, she might stand here all night, waiting for him to give her some sign that for at least another day he'd be all right.

"Okay," he says hoarsely, and has to swipe his hand embarrassedly over his eyes. "I'll see about that."

She gives him a swift, birdlike smile, and nods. He waves at the car until she turns the corner.

In his apartment, he pulls GIR across his knees and switches him on. The SIR is slick and cold under his fingers, not particularly comforting, but his eyes are bright. 

"Dib-master!" he coos, throwing scrawny arms around his adopted human's neck. "You been gone too long! Whatcha doing?"

Dib isn't any better at talking to GIR now then he was when he was a kid. Gingerly he hugs the robot back, speaks while staring at his knees. "Track your master for me," he says. "Where's Zim now, GIR?"

"Um." GIR sits back promptly, only to worm even closer to Dib's chest a second later. He blinks fitfully around the apartment, and Dib wonders if he's lonely, if he knows how long he's been asleep. It's only so often that Dib can stand to have him up and about, after all; GIR being here, with him, the substitute master, is a tough reminder of how his best friendenemy up and left him on the planet alone.

"Zim-master," GIR says finally. "Uh, he's around... Rirhath-B? He's on third fall around the planet, and he don't want to open a talk line. He says tell me if you want to give a message?"

Dib rubs the little robot's head. GIR is as responsive as a puppy. He wiggles cheerfully at the attention and pulls at Dib's t-shirt.

"Nah," Dib finally decides. "I got nothing, actually." And he knows that the connection GIR's made somewhere in his machine-gut is being broken.

"Don't put me back to sleep yet," GIR half-howls, his pulls transforming abruptly into a vise-like clutch around Dib's torso. "It's so dark and lonely, and so scary waking up! I don't know where it's is!"

"Yeah, buddy," Dib mumbles, looking down at those peering, hopeful eyes. "Yeah, I hear you."

Maybe waking up after a sleep that long is like being dug up, feeling the earth brushed away and having a sad woman who might be your daughter looking down at you... cataloging what you are... and moving on to the next bit. He won't condemn even this dumb robot to that, just for a little peace tonight, and GIR's a party of one, wherever he is. Dib could use a party tonight.

Oh, Zim, he thinks, the things I could tell you. You out there in your universe, and me here, digging deeper into mine – the things I could tell you, could make you understand, finally. The things I've dug up, and turned, finally, after so many years, in the light.

3/18/08.

_Argentinian history fascinates me._


	49. Water ::DATR::

**/051. Water.**

Sixty percent of an adult male human's body is water – sea water, essentially, thus for an Irken, embracing a human is like taking a garbage bag filled with H2O, one of the most vilely caustic substances earth has to offer an Invader, and pulling it close.

Tak's always had a taste for danger, though.

Dib holds her lightly, his warm-warm hands lightly brushing her back just under her pak. She bites him under the chin hard enough to leave purple marks, but without enough force to break the skin. Water is only a skin's thickness away, water is working its way out of his body, sweat dribbling down his sharp jaw and dripping off his chin.

Tak has been coming here without paste, without prep, without _protection_ for as long as she's been doing this. Little singed spots, puffy raised areas of sensitivity, rise up where sweat spots her skin. The pain, before her pak releases nanobots to do repairs, is always minorly intoxicating. She has to shiver and Dib, locked on to her, has to feel it. He brushes the small blisters with his fingertips and lingers over them, concerned, until Tak roughly takes his wandering hand in hers and removes the offending appendage from her person. Or at least, moves it to the part of her person where she prefers it.

He can't just leave well enough alone, it's not in his nature. "Tak, stop," he says huskily. "We should take a look at those."

"Don't give me orders," she tells him pertly, and rocks where she straddles him, just to feel his movement, involuntary, under her. Power, yes; this is the power she has over him. She pulls the strings to his biological imperatives, wants diverted and directed towards her before he was even aware of their flow.

It seems like she's found the foolproof way to really get under his skin. Dib will never be as solicitous with his enemies, of course, with his friends, with his father or sister as he is with her. As long as she keeps up the balance, keeps channeling his energy, and she has him in her clutches now so she will. _Success is an accomplished fact._

Usually it's reassuring, like now, when he persists, it's an irritant. He brushes the sore spots with his other hand and looks reproachfully at her. "Seriously, Tak, let's treat these. You need to be more careful."

_If only you knew, human_, she thinks, and to distract him she presses close and growls. He's forgotten, that she's not _really _delicate. Even if sometimes she pretends.

Dib looks at her, sadly, it seems; he shifts his hands and intertwines their fingers. It's a gesture of intimacy that Tak dislikes. She twists her hands, small next to Dib's, so that they simply clasp again – nothing more than that. Such a thin barrier but she'll make use of it, even the slimmest margin is important now.

She pins him that way, with his hands next to either side of his head, while she moves - 

Tak laps at his sweat, where it's pooled in the dips made by his collarbones. Just another expression of the sea inside, and water with a little precipitate is now rolling freely from his pores – oh, she'll _sting _for this later. On her belly and the insides of her thighs.

But sting, pain, penitence – all this is worth it. She takes the water freely offered to her, because in an organism exposed to poison, one of two things may happen – the body dies or develops immunity. Tak is strong, she's a soldier born and bred, a warrior to eclipse all previous warriors. She will overcome this infection.

-- 3/20/08.


	50. Hours

**/006. Hours.**

Someday Dib will either get Tak's ship _really _up and running, or a pilot's license for his own small plane, and quit mass transit for keeps: locked up with a bunch of other people in a flying coffin for hours on end, above the clouds in a little sick-box eating food with the texture of cardboard and breathing other people's exhalations, isn't his idea of a good time.

Even flying, getting above it all, isn't worth the torture. Screaming children and airsick passengers. Dib wants to find the turbulent spots and get bounced to kingdom come, fly through wild storms with fingers of lightning bisecting the sky around him. Wants to fly with barely a skin of metal between himself and empty air.

Instead, layovers. Delays. Dry eyes. Security. Sitting for two hours on the runway while a light bulb gets changed.

The essence of humanity, Dib thinks, is waste. Of time, the world, of everything.

He reclines his seat and tries to breathe.

3.23.08


	51. Blue

**/015. Blue.**

In the old days, long gone, humans stripped down to their clammy skins and striped themselves with mud and woad before leaping into battle. The race was full of strange past-day rituals, both related to combat and not. Zim reads about the fabled excision of the breast, an Amazon practice designed to exacerbate the fluidity of their warriors when drawing a bow, and in spite of himself feels a little impressed at that kind of dedication. He reads about foot-binding after that, how little girls had their feet compressed into useless stubs in the name of beauty. That just disgusts him, makes him shudder.

Human inventiveness with their own bodies stuns him, never mind that a pak might be considered the biggest body modification of all – no human has entirely replaced the brain with hardware yet. They're working on it, though. The thought that humans may be the ones who invent the pak, mark II is one uncomfortably and not wholly formed in his mind, but the possibility is there.

At any rate – none have plumbed so deep yet. Surface modifications, on the other claw, are common: rings glint in the nose or eyebrow or lip, bars through the tongue or the nose or the brow, rings lining the ears. Torque's is the most extreme. He's still showing off his Ampallang in the locker room after gym class. It sickens Zim, simultaneously provoking the impulse to run off screaming at the sight of that hideous _thing_ emerging from Smacky's groin and the amazement that ugh, a creature would ever _do _that. Trust a human, a stinky, sweaty, stupid human, to go that distance.

Zim keeps an eye on the other body mods too, both compelled and revolted by the bright scrawl of ink coloring skin, and the rarer piercings he observes. One older girl wears a labret, an two dainty metal fangs protrude beneath her lower lip. And when Jessica climbed up on a cafeteria table and flashed the lunchroom Zim distinctly saw that the girl had pierced nipples.

Everyone (almost everyone) has something, it seems. Not the mark of a warrior anymore, just for looks, cosmetic bits of hardware. Even Gretchen with her crippling shyness displays the with pride the points of metal now adorning her earlobes. The contrast between the shame with which she sidled through youth (why didn't all that metal on her _teeth_ make her a celebrity?) and the quietly building confidence that she walks with now is a little intriguing. Not enough to demand further inspection, but a tiny bit interesting. Just a little.

Zim can only think of one person at the school who seems to have escaped the craze entirely.

Dib is leaner, stronger with age; he's still almost, almost, almost monochrome. That dark hair makes his pale skin flash so bright, and he's gotten big around the shoulders in the past few years, as if he's been swimming. Otherwise he's not fat with muscle, but lean, a runner's spare build. He'd be all black, black, white, if he didn't bruise like nobody's business.

The human's whole body is a telltale to their violence. Thundercloud bruises darken his torso, legs, shoulders; Zim once noticed a round dark navy blue bruise sitting just over Dib's heart, as if someone had thrown a baseball at the boy, hard. Blue marks, some shaded with purple, some lightening to yellow or green; some nearly red, like blood tracks in snow. No earrings, no ink other than blood spreading below his skin; no piercings, no glinting bits of metal to catch Zim's eye and cry to be ripped out.

Dib's knuckles are thick from throwing too many punches; often at school his eyes are blacked and puffy, or his lip is split. A constant parade of minor wounds marches across his face. Some are gifts from Zim, and some aren't.

It's sort of exciting, thrilling, really; at bearing witness to the growing ferality in Dib's eyes. They flicker yellow like a wolf's, and Zim can't be surprised, at how close the savage is to the surface in these creatures.

That cold uncoiling of primal fire seems to jump a little quicker when Dib spies him. It is impossible not to notice.

That's fair; after all, so many of the displayed cuts / bruises are courtesy of Zim. That's the way he wants it. Dib is a primitive, a descendant of primitives; Zim likes it best when he's reflecting that. Angry, quietly boiling, like a bed of coals that could at any second flare into life; that's how Dib _should _be.

Like his blue-painted ancestors beating their war drums, like the breathless, soundless moment before the towering storm breaks.

3.21.08

_An ampallang is a kind of male genital piercing._


	52. And ::DibGretchen::

**/083. And.**

Senior year, Dib takes an art class on a whim. He needs a break from all his hard sciences and their linear thought pattern. He needs something fun, because English class really isn't. Intro to art is open, and he's Membrane's son and the class salutorian (second to _Zim_, which grinds his nerves) so he gets in.

The class is mostly freshmen, a few sophomores, and two other seniors come in to paint and work during that class period because they have other classes that take precedence over the advanced art hour but they want to keep up with their AP work. Gretchen and Zita have both specialized somewhat in art, apparently, and they both shine. They're friends now; bristling in-you-face Zita and sweet Gretchen, he'd never have guessed.

After all his anatomy and drafting sketches, Dib has a passable, even hand – he discovers this, when his drawings don't come off badly when compared with the rest of the class. He has a little natural talent and lots of practice, and his pictures don't look all that clumsy even when they're up against Zita's conte or Gretchen's charcoals.

What he lacks is a good sense of color. His acrylics are smeary and low contrast, and the never-drying oils are a nightmare, plain and simple. He doesn't both to carry a paint palette home because no amount of out-of-class work is going to salvage his paintings and really, he tells himself, he's barely bothering with this class.

It's a surprise (a huge surprise) when after class one day Gretchen comes blushingly up to him and asks if she can paint his portrait, in oils, because they're her favorite.

"Why me?" he asks blankly, staring while she shuffles her feet and her shoulders collapse. Zita glares at him over her friend.

"We think you have an _interesting _face," she says, scowling, which is probably an insult, really. They don't clash per se but Zita isn't fond of him. In fact, she's annoyed with him a lot, which makes him feel a little awkward and a little smug all at once.

He runs his hand through his hair, thinking about after school, keeping an eye on Zim and his own personal projects that are running down in the lab. When he opens his mouth to refuse, "okay" pops out.

They meet at her house after school. Gretchen has a canvas stretched and prepared, and her parents aren't home. They're going to be alone together for however long this takes. Dib yanks nervously at his collar, beginning to sweat a little – because he's not that oblivious, seriously, he does have an idea at what might be at the root of this. But she just makes him sit down at the kitchen table, and take off his leather jacket.

The kitchen is warm, the light is cool – winter light, glassy and still, spilling in through the big windows. Even Dib after this little training can tell that this light will look good on him. It makes his start, disparate colors dramatic, like a plate photograph.

"Where should I look?" he asks her. Gretchen fiddles with her brush.

"I don't know. Wherever you want."

So, intently, curiously, he looks at her.

She paints for about an hour, an hour fifteen... she gets absorbed quickly, and stops blushing when she glances at his face. It's good to have the chance to really look at her. She has good teeth and her wrists are slender and pale, loose as she paints. Sitting like this is a good excuse just to look, without fear or shame or compunction. It's been a long time since he watched another human this closely, and was looked at back.

Probably, she could go a lot longer without noticing, but the timer she set buzzes and snaps her out of the trance. She gives her brushes a last swish in the turpentine and smiles embarrassedly at him.

"Can I see?" he asks, although he's been looking at her for just as long as she's been looking at him, and has nothing to show for it. She widens her eyes at him, but nods.

A painting – the painting makes him look different. This painting is all carefully and meticulously about him, his face, his shoulders, his arm hooked over the back of the chair. There are bare trees stark in the background. His jaw is sharp, the bridge of his nose sharp, his lips are pale and severe. She's got the scar through his eyebrow where Zim just barely marked him once. His features are a little cloudy yet, though, and she hasn't really started on his eyes. He can already see how she'll use the ocher paint laid down on the background to build his eye color, and how his dark pupils will match the interesting multilayered darkness of his jacket slung over the chain.

"I like it," he says softly. Gretchen smiles, fast and shy. "Should I come back tomorrow?"

She stares at him a moment, then fervently: "_Yes_."

"Okay," he says, laughing, feeling abruptly self-conscious, more so than usual. He always feels self conscious because he has to know where his body is, if he's fighting. Also, he's curious, about everything else, about this too. "So, hey, why are oil paints your favorites?"

She's silent for a little, putting her tubes of color back into her paint box – Alizarin and cadmium red, ultramarine and pthalo blue... Then: "Well, y'know... an oil painting, really it, ah, it can take years to finish, because it takes years to dry. You know, the good artists in the old days... they painted and painted but they didn't _really _see them finished." Her eyes are the same color as his, he can see; and deep, wide, intense. Struggling to convey something. "Because an oil painting isn't finished 'til it dries, and if there's enough paint it could take forever. And the colors might change, some, or the top might crackle and show what's underneath. Years and years, you just don't know. There's always something that might happen, might change. You don't know." She hesitates lamely, and concludes. "...that's why."

"So... a gamble. Wow." Dib pauses. "...Wow. That's got to be the longest speech I've ever heard you make." Her blush is positively fiery. She looks away.

She walks him to the door, and lets him out. He turns around on her front step before this door can close, because suddenly, he really wants to step back through it. "So I'll see you tomorrow," he says.

"Don't forget," she replies, suddenly pleading, looking up at him.

Dib looks back at her. Really looks. He says, "I won't."

3.23.08

_They're cute together._


	53. Five Ways Dib's World Didn't End

**/011. Red.**

_(STOP: planet earth)_

It was hot. The sun had been growing for the past three days, swelling like an inflamed pimple in the sky. An old, red, red, dying star. Not their own little dwarf but something big and old and hungry.

Gaz sat out with her brother, purportedly occupied with her Game Slave but really discreetly eying Dib. He was crouched on the roof, eye anxiously to the telescope, his silhouette dark against the cyan sky.

"It's so huge," he said out loud to no one in particular. "Gargantuan, even. I swear. It's just getting bigger."

"Are you talking about the sun or your head?" Gaz said, tilting her screen. It didn't help; the color was totally washed out. The light, strong as noon though it was six and well into evening, made the pixels impossible to see.

"Ha ha." Had she looked, she would've seen Dib throw her an irritable look. "Seriously, you should be worried. We're moving closer and closer to this thing and not slowing down."

"Gravity wells will do that." If she turned the screen just right, though, it caught a bit of shade and she could just barely see the outline of her character. Who was now dying horribly. Gaz sighed. "Where's Zim, anyway? Shouldn't he be here to gloat about this?"

"I don't think this is him," Dib shouted breathlessly. "I mean, he wants to use the world, right? Won't be much to use after this." She watched him fold the telescope under his arm and slide down the pipe. He landed on his feet with a thump, and tossed a concerned look in her direction. "You should probably go put some sunscreen on, ya know," he said. "That's strong."

"Whatever," she growled, glaring down. "Not like it's gonna make a difference anyway." Their shadows were as sharp as if they'd been cut from black paper, and they perfectly reflected Dib's truncated, frustrated gesture towards her. After a second he just turned around and went inside.

Gaz closed her eyes (although the casual observer would be hard-pressed to notice) and then opened them again. She glanced down at their wilted lawn and then turned back up towards the sun, huge and swollen and crimson as a stop sign.

Stop: planet earth.

Gaz squinted at the hot light until her eyes filled with tears.

4/1/08.

**/014. Green.**

_(Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair)_

The city looked so different now. Zim parked the Voot on top of one of the highest sky scrapers he could find that would support his ship and gazed out across the buildings, where the trees were taking them over. Without cars and people it was almost disturbingly silent here. The only noise was birds chirping and the wind sighing through the trees.

It was long enough now that the colonizing plants were beginning to resemble a forest, spruce trees cracking the asphalt, wildflowers growing in the sidewalk cracks. Bright, bright flowers, and stillness. The wind blew in dust and moss took advantage of the available surface; ivy climbed the building walls, the trees in the park grew scruffy, wild. Deer moved silently through the nascent forest, and wolves. Zim had rappelled down buildings before and walked through a whole new kind of jungle, one he no longer recognized, and he'd stumbled on bones jumbled in moss. Someone had died there, some human, just lied down and exhaled for the last time in that stink of panic and plague and death. Zim supposed that somewhere in the world there was probably another human still loving somewhere somehow, but he hadn't bothered to look.

All of the humans he would have bothered with were down for the count, anyway.

He imagined that Dib's bones were out there somewhere, the flesh having long since been eaten away. Bones flaking to powder, feeding their minerals back into the earth, their essence melting down and returning to its base state. A fitting fate for his enemy, reintegrated back into the planet that he'd served so zealously in life. The planet that had turned on him in the end. _All that avaricious life - !_ Microorganisms don't care if the body they wither away belongs to a hero or a criminal who never finished his treatment regime. They devour just the same.

The cities, emptied; the planet, quiet. Maybe the humans that had survived would regress, return to the trees, swing on branches, grow prehensile tails. Maybe someday an Irken squad would land here, the scouts ranging out on the deer trails, mapping the terrain, finding themselves surprised by brown hairy native aliens dropping silently from the trees.

That would be a long time. Not so long, though, that those Irkens would have forgotten Zim's name.

He climbed back into the Voot. The backwash of superheated air from its thrusters tore petals from flowers, leaves from trees.

4/4/08.

**/024. Family.**

_(zero hour)_

The road is tight and winding; Dib slurps the last of his coffee (so black it hurts) and buckles down to take the curves. Hours of driving, and pain shoots tight fingers in his spine and neck, a migraine headache throbs behind his eyes. At the next pit stop he's gonna pull off and catch a catnap, before driving again - stopping now for too long would be a bad idea. They need to be out of the state before they close the borders, they need to be out of the state _fast_.

The kid slumps in the seat next to him, breathing deep. A little twitch he is, in waking, all jitter and jump. Kind of a familiar kid, in a way. Little Dib minus the scythe, big-eyed and pale and believing and scared.

A skinny mad-looking man had pushed him into Dib's arms, before he fled the city. _Here, you take him _- the man had said - _you take him out, you take good care of him, I'll find out and fuck you up if you don't. Squeegee, gimme the bear, you don't need him. Give me the fucking bear! You _- looking at Dib again, with lancing pale eyes - _you, take care of him._

And Dib, he was left on the corner, with the car engine purring and a kid he didn't know bundled panting and scared in his arms.

A cherry slurpee and some half-melted candies had bought Dib facts, but no reasons. My name's Todd, I live on one of the ruined streets, I don't know where my dad is. Or my mom. Please don't hurt me. That man was my neighbor. I don't know why he gave me to you.

Please don't hurt me.

Well, it didn't look so good for them, but Dib wasn't so far gone he'd leave some little kid on the streets to fend for himself, so together they drove for the border. Dib didn't think they'd have problems crossing. He was well-enough known, after all, and the kid - he could pass off the kid, easy.

If they could just get to the goddamn checkpoint in one piece.

Dib fumbled for his cup again, because maybe there were some dregs he'd missed, and nearly had a heart attack when something thudded against the bumper and the whole car shuddered. He pitched forward, Todd pitched forward, and Dib braked sharply. Todd was awake now, eyes huge and nervous, fingers fumbling. "You okay?" Dib said.

"Yeah," Todd replied, tugging nervously at his seatbelt. There was a red mark on his neck where the strap pulled in a little too tight. "What was that?"

"I'll go see." Dib unbuckled himself, slid out of the door. His muscles howled with pent-up agony when he stretched, and Dib popped vertebrae all up and down his spine. Damn, felt good. He turned around and walked towards the back of the car.

There was a dog there. Some anonymous mutt, curled and snarling and shaking, a big smear of blood left where it had rolled. He would see the worms coiling in its fur, the red gleam of madness in its eyes. Dib froze, stared at the busted limbs and the blood that bubbled up from its mouth when it growled at him. "Oh, man," he said. "All the way out here, already? Where the hell did you come from?"

"Dib?" called Todd nervously from the seat. Dib glanced back at him, met the kid's huge and concerned eyes for just a second.

"Hey, don't freak out," he said, yanking a smile from somewhere and pasting it on big. "Some douche just left some boards on the road and that's what we hit. I'll just throw them into the ditch and we'll get going."

Todd blinked at him with frightened, trusting eyes, and then turned back around. His messy hair just barely poked up over the back of his seat.

Dib walked briskly to the dog that wasn't a dog anymore, grabbed it by one fore- and one backleg, and dragged it across the road. It twisted in his hands and made a terrible, gravelly noise, but didn't yelp or bark or try to bite him. Dib dropped it off the side of the road, sweating. Furious red eyes glinted at him from the bottom of the slope; runoff half-submerged its body and he could see the worms in its fur roiling. He shuddered and backed away.

He wiped his palms on his black jeans before he got back in the car, just in case there were any remainders on them somehow. Todd gave him a watery smile when he got back in the car. Feeling horrible, Dib smiled wanly back. You do what you have to, he thought, to take care of your own, and when you can't do anything you find new things to take care of.

Oh, Todd, if I die, I still have to get you to the border. We'll both get to the border. This, I won't fail.

"Let's roll," he said, and started the engine again.

2/20/8.

**/052. Fire.**

_(some say the world will end in fire)_

His window open to let the summer air flow, the scent of smoke blew in. A hot, greasy smell, and Dib's brow furrowed in his sleep and his even breaths rasped. He woke up easily, catologued his body: arms, hands, legs, feet, all essentials intact. Why had he woken up?

Lying under a cotton sheet, he breathed in the scent of something destructing. Smoke, a fire. His dark lashes fluttered against his cheeks; Dib dragged himself up out of the mire if dreams and in to nightmarish waking. Out of his window the sky was flared up red with the reflection of flame. He stared in that direction, where normally the clouds glimmered with a hint of lime green. "Zim," he whispered, gazing out at the bloodied clouds.

The night streets were quiet, busy if he knew where to look; no one paid attention to the intent-looking kid in the studded leather jacket, or the bulging satchel he carried slung over one shoulder. Or to the way he was talking to himself, either; at this time of night, all the drunks and junkies came out, and plenty of them talked. One lunatic more or less meant nothing.

"What's he doing this time?" Dib muttered to himself, his gaze trained on a downward angle, avoiding eye contact with anyone. "I didn't think after that gopher fiasco that he'd be plotting again so soon. Fuck, what if it's laser bats again?" The laser bats were a bad memory.

He stopped impatiently on a corner, allowed a fire engine to pass screaming through the red light without contesting it. Another engine followed, and then three more; Dib covered his ears and stared curiously after them. "Fucked your own plan up, space boy," he said. "Not like you've never done that before." But fire engines, that was new. The earth authorities didn't usually get called in.

Dib never got to his rival's house, although he got close enough to see it. The state of the base – what had previously been the base – came as a shock. It was cordoned off a block away. Looked like all Zim's neighbors had been leveled too.

Lots of people lived on this block. He stared around, at the blasted shrubberies and caved-in houses, at the greasy pillars of smoke rising up into the night sky and the fires that still hellishly flared and jumped. "Fucked up your own plan," he whispered. "Fucked it up royally." He wondered if the firemen would find the underground base, and if it would be recognizable as something alien if they did. There wasn't anything here for him to do.

He shifted his carryall to his other shoulder, still staring bleakly. Men and women in heavy suits were hosing down the grounds now, trying to fight down the flames before they spread, but it seemed like the fire wasn't willing to die down that easily. Bright points of flame shrank before the water and then leaped up again. "Oh, shit," said Dib, anxiously backing away. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he bumped into someone.

"Hel_lo_, Dib," the other said, and he turned around sharply, disbelieving. Tak had crept up on him, disguised and amused, her darkened eyes bright with malicious humor.

"Tak," he said. "Uh, hi. Do you know what happened here?"

"What happened here?" she repeated. "Oh, _little_ Dib, it was me. I happened here."

He stared at her and felt chills crawl down his neck. She looked so old and so cold. "You destroyed the base?" He could barely believe it. Tak had destroyed the base, for real. "And Zim?"

"I did." She looked pleased, like a cat caught with bloodied feathers stuck around its mouth, and he knew that Zim must have been down in there with his machines blowing and the computer system going crazy, and that she hadn't done this for the good of all mankind.

"Where are you going next?" he said, licking his lips, which suddenly seemed very dry. It was the smoke, that evil smoke, billowing through his hair and choking his lungs.

She regarded him with careless amusement. "Washington, I suppose," she said.

"I'll follow you," he said, knowing that she knew that he would and thought that it wouldn't make a difference in the end. And Tak... Tak was a whole different game from Zim. Maybe it wouldn't.

Pessimism would kill him. Dib squared his shoulders, forced the thought away.

"Of course," she purred, folding her arms, each hand clasping the elbow of the opposite arm. "Of course. But this is only my beginning, Dib. The first step."

4/4/08.

**/061. Winter.**

_(some say in ice)_

The sun rose that day on a frozen wasteland. It was very cold but that was nothing new, almost every day for the last three years had been bitter, bitter, freezing cold. Gretchen stoked the wood stove in the morning so it warmed their little cave up, and made breakfast with a little water and cinnamon raisin instant oatmeal packs. She would let Dib sleep a little longer, since he'd ranged so far out yesterday, looking for a new food stock to ferry back to their nest.

She was balancing the steaming pot over the fire and stirring away when she heard a shuffle behind her, Dib emerging from their pile of quilts and blankets and sleepily pulling at his nightshirt. "You could go back to bed," Gretchen said. "We've got enough stock you could take an off day and sleep in for once."

"Too cold in there to sleep without you," Dib said, and Gretchen smiled, blushed. Even in the midst of disaster Dib could make her act like a little girl again. It wasn't cold in their bed, either, even alone; they'd gone deep enough underground that the structure held heat pretty well.

"Besides," Dib said, "we're not that well off on supplies. We need firewood and gas and medicine, and fruit if I can find it. The places around here won't hold out much longer, even though we don't eat much."

She took the pot off the fire and glopped the oatmeal into bowls. The greater portion went to Dib, and Gretchen sat down across the table from him, prodding unenthusiastically at the stuff with her tin spoon. She'd never liked oatmeal much and was thoroughly sick of it, but it kept well and Dib had packed back seventeen cases of the stuff two weeks ago. It was food, too, which was never something to cry about.

Dib scraped moodily at the bowl with his spoon, pale eyes abstract and his mouth tense. "I'll see if I can find some canned peaches," he said. "Pears, pineapple, something like that. Is it Christmas? Did we miss Christmas? It'll be a treat."

"It's all right," she said. "We'll get by without that either way, I think we need fire stuff more, and water filters. Batteries."

"Whatever I run across."

"Yeah."

Ting-ting, ting-ting, went his spoon against the metal bowl. "I hate this," he said without looking at her. "I hate this so fucking much."

She reached out to him, pained. "Dib..."

"No!" he burst out, suddenly wild. "What are we doing out here? What the _hell_ are we really doing out here? This, is this what you imagined doing with your life, Gretchen? Scraping out some miserable existence at the mercy of... of fate, God, if anything's out there at all? Of ripping up encyclopedias to use the pages as firestarters? Is this what you wanted to happen, Gretchen, really?"

Tears prickled at her eyes. The back of her throat stung. "No, it's not," she said. "It's not. But I'm not ready to die yet."

"_Ready_?" he spat. "You don't have to be _ready_. Hey, at any second the wind might turn just the wrong way, and outside could be flooded with radioactive dust, and it'd be impossible to go outside, and we'd starve in here. Maybe tomorrow some other human nastier than me will show up and shoot us both because we've got shelter and supplies. Maybe in three months, radiation sickness will get to one or _both_ of us! You think you can be _ready_ for that?"

She was really crying now, tears dripping off the end of her nose and plashing into the bowl. "We still have each other," she whispered. "I don't want to die while I can still live and be happy with you. Who knows, maybe... maybe something will happen, maybe..."

"Yeah, Gretchen." He sounded really tired suddenly. "Maybe something will happen. Maybe _God_ will rescue us, how about that."

She reached out again, and he allowed her to carefully take his hand. For a few minutes they simply sat with their finished breakfasts regarding each other carefully, Gretchen still melting with tears and Dib exhausted, the lines around his mouth and eyes heavily impressed. He looked so old and he wasn't even twenty yet.

"I'd better get ready," he said finally, the sudden fire in his voice abruptly gone. "Had my eye on a few places that looked like the raiders might have missed some things. Maybe we'll eat some peaches tonight, huh?"

Gretchen swiped quickly at her eyes, moved away to clean up the room as Dib pulled on his silk underclothes, wool outer layers, rubber jacket, armored coat, gas mask. She brought him his Geiger counter as he was settling the mask over his face and experienced the usual chill at how suddenly alien it made him look. Her Dib, still dreaming.

He bumped his chin against her forehead in the clumsy parody of a goodbye kiss. When he went out the door she had to hold herself hard and shiver.

_Come back to me, _she thought, watching him strike out so small, against the snow field.

4/5/08.

END

_The destructions, in order: thrown into the sun from Planet Jackers, tuberculosis plague, zombie outbreak, act of Tak, nuclear winter._

_The quote at the beginning of Green is from "Ozymandias", by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The quotes at the beginnings of Fire and Winter are both from the poem "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost._


	54. Insides ::DATR::

**/004. Insides.**

She could look like anything. He realizes this later, when she reappears. Mostly, she likes to seem like a rangy girl too thin to be an athlete, with purple hair and clothes because Tak likes purple. As much as an Irken can be said to like anything.

So, Dib wouldn't say she likes him; maybe that it's satisfying to her, to game with him, to fuck with him. He gets his own back, now and again, by fucking with her. Literally, figuratively.

The hologram can mimic, although she doesn't often stoop to that; now and again to make fun of him. She can put on Gretchen's face, Gaz', Jessica's, Zita's, sneer at him with a coldness beyond any of those four girls, while he peels her clothes away from her skin. "Oooh, _Dib_," she might say, pursing Gretchen's gentle mouth cruelly, "So forward. Please _don't_."

If she says please, he knows, it's another part of her game. Blackly playful thing that she is.

Or she can look like other girls, ones she creates. A pudgy-faced brunette staring at him with feigned disinterest, or a girl hot and molten, red-haired, freckled. "Nice, nice," he might compliment her, fingering the fine strands of her hair. "The hologram's impressive. Force fields for texture? Tell me the secret someday."

The sneer is her default expression. "You get aroused by alien tech, boy? No wonder humanity rejects you. I reject you too."

"But you're still here," he says, spreading his hands across her narrow back. The pak is one thing that doesn't change: it's always there, a cold and humming roundness beneath his palms. "So cut the crap and change back."

She'll show him her true form because she wants to revolt him. Not with the tight green skin or the curled antennae or the enormous purple eyes: she knows the Irken form doesn't disgust him after so much exposure. She wants to drive him mad with self-hatred, that he searches for these cruel, clean-cut creatures, over a girl with his own kind.

He'll go along with it, because he likes to imagine someday that she'll slip up and spill her guts to him. Give him an opening so he can see that mind for the block of code it is. Get past her glittery, deceptive defenses. Tak's like broken glass imbedded on top of a wall. So pretty to look at, shining in the sun, and it cuts the shit out of any moron stupid enough to touch it.

Because it doesn't matter to him, what she looks like on the outside. The essence (on a human he'd call it a soul, but he wouldn't grant a soul to an Irken) is always the same. He can spot it flashing like a lighthouse on the shore.

She doesn't know, it's not the tech that gets to him, or the burn of his xenophilic desire. Dib just has a fetish for the hard, cold truth over any kind of lie.

/end

_New poll, guys. Go vote? Senri is curious._


	55. Too Much

/ 033

**/ 033.Too Much.**

Information, information, information.

Vital stuff, incalculably valuable at times, and uniquely frustrating in regards to its reliability concerning the habitat and lifestyle of the foolish _earthenoids_.

There was just so much of it!

That was part of the problem. The volume of media produced every day was staggering. And so much of it was maddeningly trivial. Reams of paper, countless film reels, hundreds of gigabytes devoted to Amsterdam Hilton's three-headed mutant pig dog sex film. To Goofy Bump's terrible comb over, not to mention his bizarre family practices. To Don Relaxing Getaway's abrupt conversion to Cthulu worship.

If only there was something that could organize and control the torrent of data, separate what was relevant from what wasn't, boil it all down into pithy articles, and present the fruit of those labors in an easily-searchable and well organized product to him!

Asking his computer to do that with even a tenth of the media produced by the nation where he was based would create a backlog. He wouldn't be able to get anything else done!

It was in carrying out an idle search pertaining to the history of slaughterhouses that his computer, and therefore Zim, had a breakthrough. The main base performed a standard "Google" search first thing, of course, selected the first link that came up, and in doing so opened what was practically, for Zim, a whole new world.

"Wee-kee-pee-dia?" he sounded out, staring at the screen.

"Affirmative, master! A lexicon of user-generated content covering almost the full spectrum of human knowledge, social practices, and culture."

Understandable, except for one thing. "User-generated content?"

"Yes."

Silence.

Zim coughed. "Well, _define_ that!"

The computer coughed too - well, it made a crackly static noise. "Content is generated by any regular human who happens to know something about the field he writes in. Anyone can create an account and modify the site."

"Anyone?! Ahahahahaaa!" Zim spasmed. "They let anyone write? Any fool wormbaby?! How can anyone possibly trust this website?!"

The alien spazzed out and cackled for about five more minutes. The computer said nothing.

Eventually, Zim clambered back to his seat, wiping thick glycerin-based tears of amusement from the corner of one eye. "Anyone, hmm? Anyone can modify the data..."

In a moment he was all business once more. "Computer! If this website covers information on every part of human social structure... try a search on the name Dib."

The first entry that came up was something about ice cream. Backtracking to the disambiguation page and looking under the Notable Persons section revealed "Dib, crazy son of the famous Professor Membrane!" and clicking on that link led to a low-quality photo of the boy himself and a short blurb.

"Sooo..." Zim chuckled and cracked his knuckles. "Anyone can modify the information, yes? Computer! Make me an account."

The next day at school, Dib looked up from boredly picking at his fingernails to stare directly into his rival's smirking face. "What do you want, space boy?"

"Want? Zim desires nothing!" The alien cackled. Paused. "Nothing!"

Dib sighed.

"Just... ahahahaha..." Zim smirked. "Just, after skool today, you and your classmates may desire to Wee-kee-pee-dia-search your name."

"Did you vandalize my page or something? Jeez." Dib rolled his eyes and affected an idiotic tone. "Duh, no one's ever done dat before!"

"Ha! Writhe in the grips of a new and wholly unfamiliar pain!"

"I was being sarcastic, Zim! Jeez!" Dib rolled his eyes again. "You do know that anybody who wants to can mess around with that site, don't you?"

"So?" Zim grinned. "It couldn't be on the internet if it wasn't true. Yes?"

"Sure!" The Letter M randomly squealed. "If Wikipedia says it it's fact! So if your page says you're nuts, Dib, it's gotta be true!"

A chorus of agreement rose from the class.

Instead of keeling over in well-deserved agony stemming from social ostracization and the contempt of his peers, Dib glance around and abruptly smirked. "Oh, I get it, Zim. So your page probably claims that you're a perfectly normal human, huh?"

That actually was exactly what Zim's page said, although rather more elaborately. He'd spent three hours the previous night detailing how in every way he was a perfectly regular, unremarkable human, human human human, look at this photo of my neck! Human!

Zim barked out a laugh. "As it happens, stink beast, you are correct! My page says I am normal because normal is exactly what I am. It practically sweats truthiness!"

"Oh really," Dib said blandly.

"Yes." Zim sneered. "Really."

Dib returned to studying his fingernails. "Maybe you should check it after school," he suggested. "Maybe you all should. Wouldn't want _Zim's_ page to be vandalized, right?"

Zim cocked a suspicious eye at his rival. "No _mere_ human would dare touch the page of Zim."

He spent the rest of the skool day gleefully chuckling to himself.

They got out at two o'clock. Pleased with his work, Zim spent a leisurely hour watching bad afternoon television with GIR.

At three-thirty he strolled down to check his Wikipedia page. Not because he was concerned or anything. Just to check.

He was greeted with an MS-Paint doctored photograph of himself. His disgustingly human-looking eyes were now pixilly red blobs. His wig had been erased; he had a pixilated, naked green pate and antennae drawn with the line tool. The clincher was the scrawled ALIEN!! in the background, with an arrow drawn pointing to him.

He hadn't even glanced at the article yet.

No doubt it was full of HIDEOUS, HIDEOUS although undoubtedly true accusations.

His classmates might have been looking at this for almost two hours! And because it was on the internet, it was totally serious business and undoubtedly true!

"DIB!" Zim screamed, although the human was nowhere near him and probably would have just pointed and laughed anyway.

Not that he had any evidence it was Dib's fault. But it was the Dib. Zim didn't _need_ evidence.

He clicked the human's page and read the first line aloud - well, part of it. "Dib, the noble and fearless defender of earth, was born in the year 2032 but only recently discovered his true calling as the savior of earth from the relentless extraterrestrial threat when he began" - gaaaargh! Dib, you stinking beast of smell! How dare you undo the brilliant work of Ziiiiim!"

He clicked the "edit page" tag. Simultaneously, he ordered a Google image search of the newspaper caricatures of Dib that had turned up after the organ-stealing incident.

And so the second skirmish of what would later be referred to as the "WikiWar" began. It was a violent but short-lived altercation, as it only lasted until the site administrators locked down both the pages for quality control.

/end - 6.22.08


	56. Spring

/062

**/062. Spring.**

Near Mother's Day, Zim's class planted marigolds to grow and take home. They pushed tiny seeds down into dark little pockets of earth where they were held for days like mysteries, tiny secrets, before the tiny green shoots first emerged.

Some of the children were unlucky. Their seeds were dead, and never grew. Bitters forced them to keep the empty pots and go through the motions of watering and caring for them. Even when the seedlings survived they were not guaranteed to thrive. Some of the children were careless. Their pinching, indelicate fingers bruised and soft green buds, wilted the bloom once it came with the oils from their skin.

Zim tended his flower with perfunctory carelessness and was rewarded a ragged but passable plant.

Strangely enough, Dib produced one of the most beautiful, healthy flowers in the class. It practically dripped chalky orange pollen and the straight-infusion-of-perfume scent was strong as anything. It wasn't that he lavished care on it, but Dib never touched the plant, even when he watered it, and it grew the better for its lack of handling. Atypically, none of the other children even hassled him about it the flower, or the deep blue pot he painted for it. Perhaps because he barely seemed to notice its exceptional nature himself, and never drew attention to it.

Zim had literal, Dib metaphorical green thumbs, it seemed. So at the end of the unit the human carried a flower that was bright and proud, back to his motherless house.

/end

7.8.08


	57. Black ::ZADR::

ZADR ahead. Written for Saint-of-Suicides, who requested ZADR hurt/comfort in exchange for drawing Dib with a keyblade. And… well, this is sort of what she requested, I guess. I have some issues with it but it's taken long enough to get out already.

**/018. Black.**

He made himself wait for the ship diagnostics to finish before he went to see Dib. The ship was their life, after all, and both of them had agreed without discussion at the beginning of the whole thing that even when one of them was serious-hurt it would be a crazy-glue-and-popsicle-sticks type of treatment until the ship was confirmed to be in decent shape. It was the ship that would really take care of them, after all.

That was their agreement. Zim hated it.

When he knew the ship was fine, he went to the infirmary.

It wasn't that he needed to or anything, he told himself, jogging down the echoing red hall. It wasn't a need, that drove him back to the human's side, it was an idle curiousity. Oh, what has the Dib done to himself? What has the Dib survived this time?

Irken hunter ships attacking, Dib stuck for ten terrifying minutes in the Spittle Runner losing air fast before Zim got to him.

Zim swore, if the human had brain damage from lack of oxygen, he'd…

The infirmary had a couple of beds – more like wells, recessed into the floor, with soft gel pads lining the bottoms. They could be filled with a slurry of healing-aid liquid chemicals, oxygenated, and capped, or they could just be beds. Dib's had been filled. He must have commanded it back to just bed-state recently; the oils still gleamed on his skin, in his hair. Zim walked to the edge and stared down at the human. Dib appeared to be evenly asleep; blessedly, his collar bone was no longer protruding from his skin, and his arm seemed to be in one piece again. An Irken would have felt… not comfortable, naked, but indifferent. Naked being almost the same as clothes. Dib, on the other end, liked to be covered up. In the heal-bath, where some skin exposure was required, he compromised with wearing snug shorts.

Zim took off his boots, hopped down, and promptly slipped and fell on his face. He growled at Dib's snicker, glared at the bleary-looking human without much real hostility.

"Hey," Dib said, in a thick, throaty voice. He always sounded ill that way after breathing the heal-bath, even for the slightest period of time. "'Sup, space boy? The ship's ship-shape?"

"Are you more important than the ship, human?" Zim grumbled, lying down on his side and watching the human from a little distance. "Would I be here if it wasn't?"

"Oh, yeah." Dib rolled carefully onto his side, facing Zim, reached out and pulled lazily at the collar of the red shift Zim still wore. "You're too dressed, space boy. Is that really comfortable?"

Zim smacked irritably at Dib's hand, changed his mind in the middle of yanking Dib's fingers off the him and simply grabbed the human's hand in his own. He bent the fingers back a little, observing how the tendons stood on the back of the hand, and rolled the thumb in its joint. Dib watched him steadily. He was lying on his other arm and couldn't really reach with it.

"I punctured a lung," Dib informed him. "And I pissed some blood earlier." Zim shuddered, dropped the human's hand to study the mottled bruising spread across the boy's pale chest, down his sides, all where the metal of his ship had crumpled and nearly crushed him on impact.

"Hey. Don't worry," the human continued. "Computer fixed me up, sucked all the blood out of my lung. And I used to pee red all the time when we fought back on earth."

Zim closed his eyes, thinking about Dib's strong, lean, hugely delicate body. Too hard an impact and the human's brain would bounce into his skull and concuss him, the hard bones even reinforced would break, soft organs would tear or burst or puncture. If his meat-body was gone he was gone. The Dib, he had no safety net. Not like Zim's pak.

It was humiliating, to bring up the old oft-refused argument once more but at times like these the idea nagged relentlessly. "Are you sure," he began, "That you must continue to refuse the pak –"

"Zim…" Dib interrupted, and his voice was suddenly so gentle and so abruptly non-flippant that Zim ground his teeth.

"Stupid human!" he snarled. "You refuse the generous gifts of Zim, well… a pak is too good for you anyway!"

Dib didn't pursue the issue, which was almost as humiliating. It was less embarrassing to hastily withdraw the offer, no matter how transparent his defense might be, than to have Dib throw the suggestion gently back into his face. Zim dug vengefully at his human's hand and then relaxed, scowling, feeling very much the injured party. Dib peered into his face and Zim guessed, he knew, before the human even said anything, that even though he probably knew the root of Zim's turmoil he was going to play dumb and not say anything. It was his method of allowing the ex-Invader some amount of Irken pride, still; and the fact that Dib realized bringing it up would humiliate him and thus deliberately refrained from doing so was in a way even more humiliating. The human, if appropriately his enemy, should have taken any opportunity offered to cut Zim down to size.

Unless it was all some subtle mind game designed to inflict the greatest possible amount of emotional turmoil while expending the least possible effort.

It became unmanageably complex. Zim gritted his teeth and forced himself to stop thinking about it.

Dib had closed his eyes again. His breathing was even, rough and slow. After a moment of Zim staring at him he opened his eyes, blinking torpidly. "Kind of creepy," he said. Zim grimaced at him and rolled over onto his other side.

Space, and all that emptiness. They looked for stars, so minute, barely significant in the face of vast and near-impenetrable distance. They focused on the wrong thing: what was so important was the lack of anything, the vacuum that propped the universe up. The cold between warm bodies. How even matter was only made up of relatively few particles, a few real, solid things, and the rest of even a reaching hand was emptiness. Sentences as islands, with the rising frigid tide between them. Warm bodies, hot in the cold.

He wrinkled his lips back, closed his eyes and felt his brow furrow with fury and… something. Confusion? His claws clenched at the air; he wished it was flesh pulping between his talons. Dib, you puling creature – you seeping, raw place of weakness. Why are you here? You with dog's persistence. Trying to change a universe with set laws.

"Oh human," he mouthed in the air, not a whisper of sound escaping his mouth. "I hate you. Oh, how I hate you."

/fin

6.22.08


	58. Fall

**/064. Fall.**

The first time: he looked into her cough-medicine eyes, which scintillated, flashed wild dreams. Fell momentarily into some otherspace where air rushed over his face, the sky around him blue, soaring, soaring. Dropped out of that world in an instant to stand upon the earth, looked at her and was amazed - amazed. Went to bed that night and dreamed vivid, wild. Dreams of flashing movement. Churning worlds.

Four years later Tak fell from space back down to the earth. Plunged right into Dib's yard again, like a thumb dragged through cake frosting. He stood, amazed, thrilled by this godly joke - was this fate, or just irony? He went right away to see what could be salvaged. And so he caught Tak coming out, her legs pulped, dragging herself with her paklegs. A stream of ichor running from her mouth. "Dib," she rasped at the sight of him. "I didn't think I'd..." and she slouched, suddenly unconscious.

He picked her up, amazed at her lightness. Carried her to the labs feeling as if something special had fallen into his hand: a star, a firefly. A phoenix chick, slick and new from the egg.

Two weeks later she awoke - naked, plush green skin exposed and prickling, punctured with needles feeding a glucose solution into her veins. Dib there, skipping school, hair damp and skin white as tallow. "Human," she said. "What have you done?"

Dib looked up from contemplating his clasped hands. "Hi," he said. "Were you aiming for my yard, or was it just freak chance that you landed here? Because, you know, it's not the first time falling alien artifacts have ruined the lawn."

"Mimi," Tak said, heavy with effort. "Did she come from the ship?"

Dib shrugged. He was plumbic, leaden, heavy with exhaustion. "It was too hot to get close. I didn't look for anything. You came out, and that was all."

She fell back down again, supine. Less threatening in her nudity. The coil worming from her skull gleamed coldly. Dib fixed upon it: remembering. _Flight. Cold air in his throat._ Made himself bold, reached out and touched it. "What it this? You did something to me with it, a long time ago."

"Ahh." Her lips drew away in an instinctive growl. "The hypnosis coil. I remember. So you liked it, human? I'm a little impressed." Leering, now, her voice dark, as awful and conniving as Zim. "Most of your kind can't handle it."

"Do it again," Dib said. His eyes blazing like a zealot's. "Give me another shot."

"Oh?" she grinned. Grimaced. "Come here."

He came closer and she pulled him down by the hair, training her eyes on his: the vast purple fields flashed like fireworks and drew him down into

_flight_

_the sea crinkling below_

_air rushing on my face, wind running through my hair_

_and_

He woke sprawled on the floor, stiff, shaking. Eyes moistened. Already he ached to go back. Four years and he had forgotten that feeling. Now remembered and lusted for it, bone-deep.

Tak looked closely at him when he managed to stand. Dib dragged himself up, stared back at her, pulsing sweat and radiant heat. Her eyes a gate to another world.

"What did you see?" she said lowly.

"I have to go," he replied, and went up to the roof to feel the breeze fingering his hair. It wouldn't be long before he went back and asked her again.

Dib had always been prone to obsessive behaviors. Addiction. It was a vice strong in him. Tak was better than a needle in his arm, a bottlemouth kissing his lips. What she gave was more transcendent, and better, and freer, a jolt of stimulus straight to the brain, no worries about blood alcohol content or burnout, or withdrawal.

Life went on. Dib moved out of the house, got a lab job. Took the alien with him.

Two years later, they found him – what remained of him – in his apartment. The cubicle, more like. A Spartan little set of rooms, poorly furnished. He'd spent most of his paycheck outfitting Tak with what she needed to live, and keeping up the expensive machinery that had replaced most of her lower body so that she could be a kept creature and comfort.

Firemen broke down the door. They were mankind's first acknowledged contact with an alien race. They found Tak, lying, punched full of needle-holes and grinning down at what was left of her captor. The withered Dib, who'd taken a shot from the coil, staggered and fallen and in a stupor breathed his last. But far away from his body, dreaming, wild, the vision of the ocean, air screaming strongly over his skin.

/end fall

August 16, 2008.


End file.
